According to this announcement , Tom Potter has left Destination Games and his position as lead designer of Tabula Rasa to "pursue another opportunity in the industry," and Susan Kath has been chosen as his replacement.

Kath has been working on Tabula Rasa for the last four and a half years, having originally joined the team as a fiction writer and most recently working as the lead mission designer. She wore many hats before attaining her current position, and hopes to oversee some new additions to the game as far as battles are concerned.

NCsoft's Operation Immortality (tm) offers humans the chance to "contribute to mankind's greatest achievements." The initiative, founded by legendary game designer Richard Garriott, under the belief that perhaps some catastrophic event could destroy human civilization. Operation Immortality's goal is to record mankind's greatest achievements and also keep a digitalized archive of DNA structures of exceptional people.

And they want your help.

The idea of space travel has captivated humanity for centuries. Today, the wealthy are paying small fortunes to sign up to be able to travel into space. Now, your Tabula Rasa character can head into the great beyond - for free.

In October, Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott will visit the International Space Station, and he's taking the Immortality Drive with him to launch into orbit. The Immortality Drive is a digital time capsule uploaded with the DNA of various space afficianados and video game players, and you could be one of them. Every character active in Tabula Rasa as of September 2, 2008, will be uploaded to the drive to make the trip as well. But that's not all; each week, 8 lucky players will be chosen to have their own DNA digitalized and added to the disk.

In order to allow everyone to be part of this great journey, Tabula Rasa is offering

"I've been able to do some very exciting things in the games business, but nothing of this magnitude," said Garriott, executive producer for Tabula Rasa at NCsoft. "I'm thrilled we can offer the once in a lifetime chance to millions of gamers to virtually go to space with me. A select few will have their DNA digitized and sent. And, theoretically, if anything happens to the human race, it could be their DNA that is used to resurrect humanity."

Starting today and lasting through August 31, 2008, anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can go to http://www.OperationImmortality.com and participate in weekly polls on humanity's greatest achievements which will be included on the Immortality Drive, such as "What is the greatest song of all time?" and "What is the greatest technological breakthrough of all time?" Current Tabula Rasa players, or those who download and play the free trial, will also be able to enter a personal message for inclusion on the Drive.

"This is your chance to leave your mark," says Garriott. "While everyone can participate in the polls at OperationImmortality.com, Tabula Rasa players will be the only gamers in the universe who can say that a piece of them is in space, since we're sending their in-game alter-egos, and for some, their DNA, to space with me."

Deployment 10 is now live in Tabula Rasa. Highlights include a new LFS system, 9-month veteran rewards, and an updated and FASTER combat system!

Check out the details in this extensive post .

Finally!  Tabula Rasa has announced they're actually going to start work on crafting.  Friday's update was quite a pleasant surprise!

Hello! I'm Mike Moore, one of TR's senior game system designers, and I'm about to begin working in earnest on improvements to our Crafting system. For all of Deployment 11, I have been working on prototyping some small but important changes to Crafting. On evaluation of that prototype, many of us feel like we're on to something good. So, at this point, we want to polish things up and get them out to the Public Test Server and let you guys have a look.

Now, let me make clear from the get-go that the upcoming changes to Crafting are intended to be incremental. We aren't going to publish this as a massive, game-changing update. Instead, we're going to make small changes over a few upcoming publishes. The idea is to ease TR into a new and improved Crafting system rather than throwing it off the deep end.

We've had a Crafting revamp on the back burner for a few months, and now we're in a position to put some development resources behind it. At this point, our rough (and always subject to change) plans are to get an iteration on Crafting up on the Public Test Server with Deployment 12, and then add more incremental improvements in subsequent Deployments.

Go Mike, Go! For more details on what's planned for the revamp so far, head over to the info !