Pinnacle Entertainment Group (Savage Worlds RPG) is recruiting for a part-time Production Assistant, by which the company apparently means they will do a little bit of everything: project management, marketing, sales, customer service, and graphic design. Working remotely is a possibility.

Panda Game Manufacturing needs Account Managers to work with publisher clients, one with an Asia focus, one with a France focus, one with a Germany focus, and one general. Also the company is looking for a Project Manager. Everything is remote.

Asmodee North America (Fantasy Flight Games) is looking for a Legal Assistant, an Application Developer, a Help Desk Support Technician, and people to work in the FFG Games Center. All positions are in Roseville, Minnesota.

In Rhode Island, there’s a Design Manager position available with Hasbro Gaming. Duties involve coordinating between market feasibility, production, licensing relationships, and other aspects of product development.

Hasbro subsidiary, Wizards of the Coast, has a several openings, including Software Developer, Program Manager, and Digital Marketing for MtG in Renton, Washington; Community Coordinator in Spain; and WPN Senior Store Lead in Germany.

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AEG has announced an end to the Doomtown: Reloaded expandable card game. The company will cease production after release of the Blood Moon Rising set in October. Story content and event support will continue through the end of the year, after which all rights to the game will revert to Pinnacle Entertainment.

Doomtown is based on Pinnacle’s Deadlands Weird West roleplaying setting but AEG’s announcement indicated that Pinnacle has no immediate plans to continue the card game.

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The land of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar series of novels has gotten the Savage Worlds treatment. Direct from Pinnacle Entertainment (now in PDF, later in print) there’s Lankhmar: City of Thieves, which features details on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, other personages, monsters, and greater Nehwon. Included in the book are also setting-specific guidelines for characters, gear, and magic. Along with the book, two poster maps are available: one for Nehwon and one for the city of Lankhmar.

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Fans of Rifts will soon have an officially supported but simpler roleplaying system with which to explore Palladium’s classic game. Pinnacle Entertainment announced today that it has secured a license to develop Rifts for Savage Worlds.

Rifts is a multi-genre post-apocalyptic setting that includes elements of fantasy, science-fiction, horror, cyberpunk, mythology, mecha, and more.

According to Pinnacle, Rifts for Savage Worlds will be available by December.

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The Last Parsec is a new campaign setting being developed by Pinnacle Entertainment for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. As the name implies, it’s a science fiction setting. Yet besides that, The Last Parsec is bit difficult to pin down. It has a little bit of everything. As lead project manager, Timothy Brian Brown, explained to Purple Pawn:

The Last Parsec uses the Savage Worlds core rules and the Science Fiction Companion, which gives Game Masters the key sci-fi elements that we feel introduce the most exotica into galaxy-spanning roleplaying fun. Then, rather than focus on just a few central conflicts or themes and funnel everybody into those, we created a vast panoply of possibilities where GMs and players can engage in whatever sort of sci-fi fun they choose. It’s a big universe, and The Last Parsec reflects that.

Pinnacle’s approach to product roll-out for The Last Parsec is also a little different. Instead of starting off with a core book, Pinnacle’s initial release will be three campaign books. Six short-fiction works are already available.

In short, our goal is maximum adventurous fun at launch. We’re providing a Primer free as a PDF download to anyone and everyone, which gives all the information on The Last Parsec’s Known Worlds to get everyone started, including the GM. The Plot Point Campaigns and Savage Tales in each of the first three adventure books should keep players plenty involved until we publish the setting book—which will open up every aspect of The Last Parsec for limitless campaigning.

The Last Parsec is up on Kickstarter for another 3 days but has already funded over eight-times over. Pinnacle estimates delivering PDF versions of the books in November, print versions in May.

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Pinnacle Entertainment Group has licensed its Deadlands property to Visionary Comics, which in turn is working with IDW Publishing on trade and Tor Books on a line of novels.

The first trade book, Dead Man’s Hand, collects four previously published Deadlands one-shots and is planned for release in March 2015.

While there is no schedule yet for the novels, three are already in progress by authors Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, and Jeff Mariotte.

Deadlands’ creator, Shane Hensley, has signed on with Visionary for transmedia projects. Pinnacle reports that a Deadlands live-action television show is still being actively developed with Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios, despite the latter company’s announcement in July that it would shut down that business.

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Microsoft has announced a slate of original video programming to be released through its Xbox game platform. One of the shows in development by Xbox Entertainment Studios is based on Deadlands, the horror-western mashup RPG from Pinnacle Entertainment Group and Shane Hensley.

Deadlands has seen a number of incarnations, including d20 and and GURPS, but currently uses Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds game.

According to Microsoft, its new Xbox Originals programming will make use of the system’s interactive features and will also be available through other outlets.

Xbox Entertainment Studios has committed to a script based on the successful pen-and-paper role playing game created by Shane Lacy Hensley. “Deadlands” is a genre-bending alternative history of the Weird West, filled with undead gunfighters, card-slinging sorcerers, mad scientists, secret societies, and fearsome abominations.

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Highly anticipated among Savage Worlds players, both the Super Powers Companion and Science Fiction Companion were released by Pinnacle Entertainment this week. Available now as ebooks at $15 each, the two volumes can also be preordered in print ($20 softback, $25 hardback). Unfortunately, while at a discounted price of $5, Pinnacle still charges extra to add a PDF copy to a print order.

The new Companion books expand Savage Worlds Deluxe in two popular genres. As Shane Hensley of Pinnacle explained to Purple Pawn:

I think we’ve done so much with horror—particularly historical horror with Deadlands, Solomon Kane, Weird War Two and Weird Wars Rome—that [science fiction] is really just a niche we haven’t served. We released Slipstream several years back, but that was space opera and a very defined setting. A lot of folks want to play Star Frontiers, Traveller, Star Wars, and games in those veins, and the tools to do so have so far been scattered and inconsistent.

We were fortunate to be able to do both Super Powers and Science Fiction at the same time to make the underlying “math” make sense. We do a *ton* of work behind the scenes to make things flow, and if the math isn’t solid…at least within a narrative framework like our chase rules…it won’t work.

I think the updated Super Powers Companion was so anticipated because super heroes are so hot right now. Most every convention I go to has Savage X-Men, Savage Avengers, or Savage Dark Knight. And they’re *really* fun. The new edition adds even more options and streamlines things even more, so I suspect we’ll see LOTS of super hero games this year.

The Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion is a second edition that features a new “graphic novel format” and includes a powers construction system, thematic hindrances, setting-specific options for death and defeat, HQ construction guidelines, and an extensive rogues gallery.

A new book (though it does draw on earlier Toolkits), the Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion gives special attention to refined rules for creating new species, while of course also addressing cyberware, power armor, starships, vehicles, and walkers.

With the Science Fiction Companion, [my favorite part] was probably the running huge space fleet battles with the Chase rules. I ran about 20 of them and had a *blast* every time. They work quite well, I’m happy to say, and provided a lot of drama in the playtests as ships would make a killing blow just as their last shields gave out or they were down to their last wound.

I’m looking forward to running an integrated military sci-fi game where some of the heroes are defending a ground defense battery in power armor while other player characters are duking it out in space fighters above to keep the bombers off their backs.

And maybe…with groups who are into that kind of thing…throwing in giant walkers for the bad guys and some super-powered reinforcements for the heroes, something like DC Comics’ “Green Lantern Corps.”

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