Yet Another Wraeththu Watch

From author Gabriel Strange, writing on the official Wraeththu rpg message board:

Everything is writen now Just waiting for final illustrations and proofing from the beta readers. Once thats in it will take approx 3 weeks till we get our first boxes and we will post then straight away. As we have a man in the US all games sent withing th US will take only a few days the sames goes for UK and Europe.

I hope to have all the final bits in from the tsters in the next few weeks. I will nudge them to get a move on.

That post is from Dec 30th, so the end of January looks like the absolute earliest the Wraeththu rpg will come into existence.

Furthering looking around the official Wraeththu website led me to this page, which seems to indicate that the cover price in American dollars will be $45.99. That's quite a chunk of change, even if I wasn't currently committed to not buying new rpg systems. I think Nobilis and the deluxe, full-color edition of Silver Age Sentinels are the only gamebooks I have ever gotten in that price range. For only four dollars more than the price of Wraeththu, I could get the Conan rpg from Mongoose. (If I need to explain to you how cool Conan is, then maybe you ought to be reading another blog.) For five bucks less I could get the rather pricy Paranoia XP. And there's a whole lot of kickass indy stuff available for half the asking price of Wraeththu. Heck, once we're to 46 bucks, getting the D&D 3.5 corebook set isn't that far out of reach. Amazon has it for $61.17.

So it looks like I won't be getting Wraeththu: From Enchantment to Fufillment any time soon. Maybe if it had come out on its original release schedule I would have blown the cash on it. But the plain truth is that nearly any other new system I might pick up stands a greater chance of getting me to actual play. I hate to turn my rpg buying habits into a popularity contest, but the hard truth is that I already own a bunch of games that no one particularly wants to play.