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!