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
