The rights to Reflex are in a hazy situation. Keith and I once discussed transferring the system's legal ownership to me (we'd always intended it to be a generic modern system, not exclusively tied to 2013). He's stated elsenet that the transfer happened, but I never received a signed contract from him. Absent that legal document, the system's ownership still resides with whatever legal entity succeeded 93 Games Studio - probably Keith himself unless he started another LLC.
Having said that, my layperson's understanding of IP law is that you can't actually copyright game mechanics, so the concepts and principles of Reflex are available for someone to use as the underpinnings for a "spiritual successor" sort of work. I can tell you that it's unlikely to be me who designs it. I don't know if I have another core system in me. Most of my tinkering these days has been with house rule modifications of v2.2 and occasional forays into other uses for the Gumshoe and Powered by the Apocalypse engines.
If I
were going to redesign Reflex (which is not a coy hint - see preceding paragraph), the first thing I would do would be to rework the initiative system. In demo games and short campaigns I ran, it was the single biggest time suck and the greatest sticking point for new players. I personally loved it as a departure from turn-based initiative that provided greater tactical flexibility, but it required a lot of focus from the referee and every player to maintain speed. "Huh, what, it's my turn again already?" I would probably replace it with a conventional turn system, but with individual characters' action economy based around sort of action point system (the X-COM influence is still strong) rather than a fixed number of actions. See also
my comments on initiative here.
- C.