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