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