Expect Fading Suns at GenCon 2012

According to a post on their site, RedBrick will be coming out with their much-awaited Fading Suns Player's Guide at GenCon 2012.

The Fading Suns Player's Guide (Revised Edition) will be released at Gen Con Indy 2012 and is available only from the RedBrick/FASA booth #1935. Holistic Design Inc. will also have limited quantities of the Player's Guide for sale at Dragon*Con 2012, in Atlanta, GA. The book is perfect-bound, 6.125x9.125", 384 pages, b+w interior, MSRP$34.99. A PDF version will be available for purchase soon from OneBookShelf (details to come). Trade print and distribution to come after Gen Con (details to come).

The Table of Contents for the book is also available at their site. It gives us a general sense of the depth and breadth of coverage of this book -- important, because we are also expecting the Game Master's Guide to come out after this -- however, they have also shared other bits of news regarding what we can expect:

The universe is still the same as described in Fading Suns Second Edition, but the timeline has advanced to the year 5002. Emperor Alexius has steadily worked to increase the strength of the Phoenix Empire. Minor houses are beginning to play a more important role, both as puppets of the Royal houses and as strong supporters of the Emperor. By placing sons and daughters into the Order of the Phoenix as Questing Knights, the minor houses have been granted new access to land and titles.

The Victory Point System (VPS) has been modified to use Victory Points as both the number of successes and as a quality of success...

Body and Mind traits remain the same as in Fading Suns Second Edition, but there are new Spirit traits: Presence, Will, and Faith. These traits are not the opposed Spirit traits of Fading Suns Second Edition, but mirror the Body and Mind traits...

Skills have been streamlined and narrowed in focus. In some cases (such as combat) there are more skills, instead of relying only on a few skills to perform all combat actions...

Psychic powers are more flexible, as they can be modified by spending extra Wyrd before the power is used, or by spending Victory Points after the power is complete, to reduce the effect but make the duration longer. Theurgic powers are still static, but tend to have more powerful effects. Both Urge and Hubris remain as a counterbalance to using these abilities.

The combat system has been overhauled. Characters have a derived Initiative trait, and each combat turn add a d6 to it to determine their starting order. Combatants can choose different stances, based on whether they want to act aggressively, defensively, or balanced. Those characters that specialize in fighting styles have special stances available to them that can add to or improve the standard stances. Each turn in combat represents one action; multiple actions have been removed, though some actions may act like multiple actions, such as striking or shooting more than once, or drawing and shooting. Instead of dodging attacks, all characters have a Defense trait that represents their ability to avoid harm. The more attacks they face in a turn, the lower their Defense.

Armor and weapons remain the same as in Fading Suns Second Edition by having effect dice for armor or damage respectively...

For more information, check out the post. Now, we may have to wait a while for the actual PDFs to come up and pass judgement -- here's hoping it does reignite this property.