Lost Relic Industries 2019 Year in Review!

It's that time again when we demark the passing of a year. Much has happened over here at LRI, and I'd like to share a little of what we've been up to!

January

We joined the Tenkar's Tavern online discord community. This was a big step for us, as Liz and I have been very self conscious of community and peer reception of our efforts. Eric Tenkar and Pexx, of the Tavern, were super supportive, and the community is great!

Brian and Liz attended their first podcast! Pexx of the Tavern community invited us to Breakfast Club, and we got a chance to jibber jabber with other designers and makers in the industry!

Erik interviewed Brian on the Fireside Chat channel (thats me, I feel weird talking about myself in third person!).

Collected Comics and Games of Fort Worth hosted a great charity event for The Safe Haven of Tarrant County. This event was coordinated by Rie Conley and was a lot of fun. I volunteered to GM SsoS but ultimately ended up playing in a 5e AL game. They are hosting again this year Jan 11 to 12 at https://www.staycollected.com/ the Alta Mere location. It's billed as UniCon, and we're going to be there Sunday!

February

We spent a crazy amount of time crunching on the game. There was so much work to do. We were trying new formatting and writing examples to help clarify rules.

March

Minor updates to both books! This includes the new example rules and some expanded adventure content in the GM book.

April

Juan Ochoa joins the project. We met Juan through another designer and hit it off right away. When we described the project, he was on board right away, and he has helped us to create a new a unique look for SsoS.

Flyers! The first contract art came back from Juan for the 2019 con year and with the help of Rob over at Squid Pie Printing, we were able to produce some really nice looking flyers to hand out this year!

Tshirts! Rob also handles tshirt printing and whipped us up a bunch of free SWAG shirts for the conventions this year, complete with the mammoth skull shield!

Players book 2.0.0 released! Kind of a big deal for us. This release contained a lot of the core feedback that had to go into the rules to make the game what it is today. This also consisted of a complete rewrite of character creation by Liz, which was no small feat!

May

Chupacabracon! With 2.0.0 ready and pushed on drivethrurpg, flyers, free tshirts, and a new adventure (The Beast of Murghadem) we were ready to take on Round Rock, Texas. Our first time at Chupa was amazing, and every one of our three game sessions filled up! We had the widest age range of players at any convention so it was a different game everyday! We met some really cool folks here, and will definitely be back in 2020.

June

Free RPG Day! Doc's Comics and Games of Frisco has always been very supportive. Doc asked if I would like to come out again this year and GM SsoS at the store. This is really cool since we don't have a distributor, so there is really no SsoS merch they can sell in store. We were there in 2018 but had no players for the SsoS game, however, we ran an excellent FATE game that year. So, we were very surprised to get players show up for two back to back games in 2019. We had a great time!

NTRPG Con! Had to go to this local con! It's part of the Tavern Community and is run by Bad Mike over there. We had work/life and ended up showing late. We were only able to fill one game on Sunday, but we were so grateful for the players who came out and gave us feedback. We also got to meet Eric Tenkar and Rachel at the Frog God booth so that was really cool!

July

Frantically working on GMs book most of this month. We had editing, revising, rules tweaks, the mini campain needed a lot of love, and we wanted to rework monster creation.

August

ReaperCon! Our return to Reapercon! 2018 Reaper was our first convention before having anything published. We had only one game fill with players that year, so this year was amazing as we filled three games with players and had a blast running The Beast of Murghadem one last time in 2019.

We also got to meet our buddy Pexx in person finally! As well as many of the staff of Frog God Games who were attending Reaper for the first time!

Our friend Pexx was offered a position with Frog God Games! Because of this, he needed to relinquish some of his duties on the Tavern discord. I volunteered to take over hosting the RPG Coast to Coast Podcast! This has been a wonderful opportunity, and we get to chat Friday nights with different folks in the industry! Be sure to check out RPG Coast to Coast on discord if you ever just want to hear folks in TTRPGs and OSR community talk casually.

September

GM Book 2.0.0 FINALLY! This thing was so much work getting tidied up, but it had to happen. We got most of the loose ends taken care of, and this beta version is much easier to read and play from. We still have some content that we intend to release in the final book that isn't included here yet!

October - December

Crunching on 3.0.0 of the player's book. Basically we reviewed this book forward to back at least a half dozen times, searching for errors and typos. We clarified spells, skills, and took another stab at revising character creation. We split Character Advancement into another chapter and added quick templates to give players everything they need to advance their character!

The final version 3.0.0 PDF of player's book went online (DriveThruRPG) the day after Christmas! This was a huge deal for us and the PDF landed in at 133 pages with formatting for artwork when we go to finalize.

Obviously, many other things not mentioned here happened in 2019 as well. We've been very busy and wanted to share to let people know that we aren't sitting around doing nothing.

So what's in store for 2020?

First things first! The situation at Lost Relic is pretty much that we're wanting to produce these awesome books for an admittedly home made game! :) Reality is that we've done nothing to monetize this. In fact, we probably won't be able to afford to finish everything we want to do on our own.

At present, we're taking a break from content creation/correction to focus on what crowdfunding options we have. This is a pretty intimidating thing as we're not marketting/sales people, and our community is smaller than most people's personal FB accounts!

That means we have to keep our overhead costs for fulfillment and shipping as low as possible, but we still want to produce a quality product. We're going to be reaching out to anyone and everyone in our network who can help with this while we dig in. We really want to get something launched and funded soon (Q1).

We will be looking to do one book at a time, so we can focus on succeeding and not sucking!

So what's left to do anyway?

The player's book is still short 3 core pieces of art. We've been commissioning art out of our own pocket this year to try to complete this book. It was very important to us that we have something finished to show before asking the community for financial backing.

We also have a lot... A LOT of extra space in the player's book to fill in with additional art which we just can't afford right now.

We would like to add some graphic art to the character sheet and spell books, if possible.

The GM's book has more content that we would like to add

• Optional Exotic races
• Optional Exotic class

MAPS! We have contacted an excellent map artist who is presently on board and will embody the spirit of the project, but we havent been able to commission anything yet for the GM's book. This includes the world map, as well as maps of Akmon and... Hdathem!

GM Screen. We will be looking at how to put together a handy screen for GMs. Nuff Said :)

Future Planned Books

Bestiary – We've really gotta have a proper bestiary. The GM's book bestiary chapter is enough to get people started, but we want something proper that sustains the game better and provides more detail to the setting.

Murghadem Campaign – Murghadem has been a player favorite setting in Sonnegard, and I feel like we have enough here to begin to flesh it out for people. This would make an exciting first supporting book!

That's mostly it! That's what happened and what we plan to happen. The amazing thing is that pretty much everything that we said we were going to do, we did. We're going to push hard to make sure that holds true in 2020 as well.

Wishing you a Happy New Year and Great Gaming!

- Brian & Liz

Influences and inspiration of Sonnegard

I've not had much time to catch my breath lately so this post may prattle on abit.  I'm just now sitting down to catchup after our play test session today which comes on the heels of a long work week and the Coast to Coast Show last night on Tenkar's Tavern.

Would you like to Biggie Size
If you haven't caught up with the news, the fast food chain Wendy's has released an RPG a few weeks ago at https://www.feastoflegends.com/.  Yes it's real.  A full 97 page pdf filled to the brim with artwork, maps, adventures, pretty decent layout and presentation.  I thought about doing a review but, most of the major sites will have had one now and frankly its clearly just a parody.

That said, it does leave me wishing that we had the marketing budget to blow on something so slick as a freebie. Ok yeah, there's the ugly side of my envy. We're working awful hard in our 'spare' time on our little project thank you.

I did want to talk a little bit about the ideas that helped to influence me in the creation of the fantasy world of Sonnegard.

There and Back Again and Back and forth.. and a little over there.

So maybe it goes without saying that Tolkien was a huge initial influence. Not in a direct way however. Basically his stories were my introduction to fantasy. As a child I had this small Rankin Bass read along book and record of The Hobbit. The story enthralled me but the book was small and missing alot. A year or so later,  my grandmother purchased the actual boxed set including The Hobbit and the Ring Trilogy.  It didn't take long before I wanted the Silmarillion as well.

So what does this have to do with Sonnegard? Well to start, it got my imagination going down the road of fantasy at a very early age.  I couldn't get enough of stories of dragons, heroes wielding swords and elves.  Also, importantly is that a central theme of Middle Earth is that elves are departing the world and becoming less 'influential', they are leaving the world to humans and I really like this idea of loss.

Robert E Howard - Hyboria

So putting time differentials and some of the man's quirkiness aside, I feel a little kinship to this man.  Having spent my youth outdoors all over Texas, I too used to imagine a time lost to history where past mysterious civilizations roamed the world. In truth, its not that difficult as texas was once inhabited by many native american tribes.  This interplayed with my fascination of Tolkien's elves. So it makes sense that Hyboria would strike a chord.  Howard's world was meant to be a throwback to re-imagine the ancient civilizations we know in a lost part of history that never was and was filled with sorcery and strange beasts. Howard in particular had a fascination with humans in a 'barbaric' state in which the person is in some sort of 'ascension' to more modern civilization and rises just above the level of beast but is not yet civilized. He idealized this status, right or wrong. In present context of course, I would argue that the 'barbarian' is civilized but simply adheres to a different cultural code and lifestyle.

Wendy and Richard Pini - Elf Quest

I first encountered the Elf Quest graphic novels in my youth around age 11 (maybe a little too graphic for youth, but whatever). The setting immediately grabbed me because here were the tribal elves that I had imagined roaming the forests and hills of Texas. What was more interesting is their quest which in many ways reflects a sort of fall from glory. This theme is reflected frequently in Tolkien and Howard.

It came from outerspace.. HP Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

I was late to the Lovecraft scene, only discovering his works in High School. But I think that 'At the Mountains of Madness' is such a strong theme in horror and rings so true with us almost on a genetic level, that its ideas echo through generations of art.

In SSoS our main antagonist arrived from space, and brought shapeless oozes which seek to corrupt all life in the world. This is a very Lovecraftian twist on more traditional fantasy archetypes.

And lastly, I'd say that History is the final influence. I've often wondered why we were taught in school that civilization began in Egypt 5000 years ago. It didn't make sense to me that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and only in the last few thousand did we decide that we like housing and hot baths.  Humans are intuitive and by nature we are hyper evolved to communicate in packs and craft and use the most advanced tools. So it was no surprise to me when archeology started uncovering stone structures that date back literally to the end of the last ice age.

This is what we're trying to explore in Sonnegard, an alternate world with fantasy races and long lost civilizations rising against a hard wilderness with prehistoric beasts. Its packed with everything from the paleolithic to the early iron age.

If you've bothered to read all of this I will leave you with some sneak peak artwork from our Player's Book. We are very excited to be working with Juan Ochoa to illustrate this book!  This image has the many races of Sonnegard resting and conversing overnight in an ancient ritual hunting lodge. The lodge was inspired by the real world site of Gobekli Tepe.

Player's Book, Incoming Updates

PreRelease GM Book 2.0 DONE!

Ok, the Game Master's 2.0 book is now up on DriveThru RPG.  This has been a HUGE improvement to the early GMs book and it no longer appears to be the scattered compilation of notes that it once was.

Returning back to the Player's Book, we still have a bit of work to do. This fits into two categories:

First, are gameplay and 'balance' issues. Second are organization and editing issues.

SoapBox about MMORPG design vs TTRPG design concerns.
Now before I start with balance issues. Let me address that our primary design concern is not how well PCs perform metrically in combat vs one another. Those concerns are very important when developing a video game with rigid mechanics in which the ONLY contributions and player can make are through fight mechanics. That also includes traditional video game tropes of party makeup (tank, damage, healer, etc).

A tabletop RPG offers the players and game master more ways in which to contribute than pure fight mechanics. Even combat can be creatively solved and not all solutions require combat.

For this reason, our focus has been on making each class feel unique and fun and given the ability to contribute. We much prefer that the GM is in a position to be able to easily customize encounters and situations to appropriately challenge any party composition.

Alright, what are the nerfs already?

1. We plan to adjust attack roll bonuses down. Some classes were simply scaling up too rapidly with the bonuses and added advancement points and abilities. 
2. Spell Skills really had little to no difficulty in casting. Because of this, we intend to remove the intellect requirements for some spells and add a difficulty modifier to cast to all spells. Less powerful spells and spells of different types of magic will have different modifiers.
3. Shamans Healing totem will no longer be turn based. The original idea was interesting, but this was simply too strong and recovery times were way too rapid.
4. The experience requirements for advancement are being increased in order to slow progression slightly and give players an opportunity for more adventuring at all levels.

Ok so organizational stuff

1. We're reviewing Chapter 5, character creation. We want to be sure that the instructions are clear and easy to follow.
2. We're moving the Character Advancement section into its own chapter and providing better instructions.
3. Chapter 9, Magic and Spells will have the spell lists reorganized under each magic type alphabetically.  Each spell will have a new listing for it's level and will still appear in the Spell table list under level, however when looking up divine spells for example, they will all be in one alphabetical list.

Moving forward we want to let the Game Master's book stand on its own hopefully until it can be revisited for final publication in 2020.  In the meantime, we're putting everything back into the Player's Book and will do our best to have what we consider an official version by early 2020.

What the heck? Are we even doing stuff?

So what's going on at Lost Relic and why have we been so 'quiet'? So this past year Liz and I have done a short tour of local shops, game conventions and anywhere else we could run Swords and Shaman and try to garner feedback.

We have been making every effort to figure out what does and doesn't work in the game, however this has been a juggling act as we aren't happy yet with the current state of the books. There are a number of gameplay issues that have been addressed and a few remaining that we would like to tackle before release.  Additionally, the books really needed revising for consistency, and grammatical correctness.

So what does this amount to? 

Well, as I type this we have just completed the final edits of v2.0 of the Revised GM book. This is the third review! I did mention we want this stuff to be correct.

Some basic rules such as jumping have been rewritten, and terminology has been made consistent.

Ok, yawwwwn. 

No, there's some good stuff in there too. We have re-evaluated creatures and creature design. The idea was that creatures weren't scaling quite well enough to keep up with the PCs.  Additionally, creature creation was admittedly very poorly done.

As a result we came up with a template system for 5 primary types of creatures. The templates should allow GMs to easily scale a creature's level up or down, scale size up or down and make it generally easier to create a new creature. Ideally, this means that you can spend a few minutes beforehand to increase the level of an encounter so that it better challenges your players! These are templates meant to be used as a starting point, so don't be shy in embellishing your creatures a little.

That's neat, but anything else?

Most of the rest were small, but necessary changes. We did some formatting to make the book easier to read, the Atlas has been corrected in several places and reorganized to make more sense. The sample mini-campaign in Chapter 7 has had numerous errors corrected. As I type this, Liz is in the process of inking an additional map meant to be used as a players handout for the adventure. 

What's next for the Game Masters Book?

After this round of changes, we plan to let the book stand on its own for awhile. We really want to go back and finish the Players Book so that it can be ready for release by 2020.  

Manotaurs?

Future additions to the GM Book will include optional exotic playable races. I'm not ready to give anything away yet, but they are pretty cool.  Ok, we're adding manotaurs. A creature with the body of a human, but with the legs and head of a human.  Just kidding, we are not going to have manotaurs. Seriously, the exotic races we do add are going to be hella cool.

In the mean time, we are going to focus on the upcoming changes & additions to the player's book to make it ready for prime time.  We'll cover that in the next post!

Swords & Shaman of Sonnegard Project (also it has been awhile)

I'm reopening this blog after many many years because at last, something is happening.  I stopped blogging here because I was moving into a new position at GameStop Corporate at the time, where I thought I might be moving closer into the game community.

It was a wonderful experience, but during my time there, my friends reawakened my first love of gaming, the table top role playing game. I found that more than computer games, my passion lay in the table top rpg experience.

As time went on, I was asked to DM for the group and eventually I had a rather exhaustive stack of game world information and a couple of house rules to our campaign.  This never felt like enough though.  I felt that we would get bogged down in rules at times, or other times I had to explain why not everything published was allowed. In other words, why our game was different.

A very good friend of mine suggested that I write a new rpg. I was dismissive of the idea at first, but as time went on, it seemed inevitable. We wanted a game that had very light rules mechanics to keep focus on the gameplay, but very robust and crunchy characters to keep players invested. We also wanted something that showcased what the game world was really like, rather than attempting to bolt rules onto someone else's very nice system.

So one weekend, I sat down and compiled all of my notes and tried to carve out something that might be playable. On Sunday, September 17th of 2017 I showed the 187 page doc file to my wife Liz who was eager to play.

Liz was impressed but right away informed me of how badly written and confusing it all was. You see, she is a former publishing assistant. So we both went right to work on hammering things out. Liz has been the best partner one could ask for, and the game simply could not exist without her. She's a writer, designer, editor and layout and pretty much everything else that needs doing.

That was almost exactly two years ago, and we have come a long way.  We have since released an early test version of the game. Our test game, 'Swords & Shaman of Sonnegard' is available for download on drive thru rpg now! We have also demo'd the game for several conventions and the feedback has been very positive. We are so grateful to everyone who came to the table

At present, we are in the process of finalizing a massive edit of the entire Game Master's book now and very soon should have a much improved version of this online. We have been working closely with Juan Ochoa https://www.juanochoa.co/ , who is doing an amazing job of illustrating the Player's Book which we hope to have finalized for kickstarter in early 2020.

In the meantime, it is my intention to continue posting updates here as well as anything else that might be relevant.

Regards,
Brian