Casting Resurrection FIN: 2026

 2026

All of that said, we knew there were some aspects of the game that didn’t quite gel the way we wanted. We’re writing a new ‘definitive edition’ that should really set and mature the game as a whole.

The definitive edition features the removal of classes and the level based advancement system in favor of a point based character build system. Your GM awards points for your sessions and you spend them wherever you want to improve the character. You can mix and match skills and abilities to new combinations that aren’t possible with a class system.

There are some other more nuanced changes. I have been working on the world backstory and history of the elves of Lemuria as a set of separate projects that I hope to tie in with independent graphic stories.

In the meantime, we’re looking at the calendar and plan to book conventions again in 2026. 

I really have no idea if Swords & Shaman will ever have a large audience, but at least we can have fun.

Casting Resurrection PT 3: Getting Up Again

 Getting Up Again.

Nobody is shutting anything down for COVID anymore. It also turns out, quite a few people like us don’t want to pay money for or participate in entertainment that preaches down to us rather than bringing us together.

Someone once asked me, ‘what is different between this game and D&D?’. I was so thrown by the question that I didn’t have an answer!

The truth is that Swords & Shaman is not a clone. Its an adventure game built from the ground up for adventure simulations. We have ONE mechanic to memorize. This is to speed the game play and shift focus back to the setting and the action.

Dungeons & Dragons is of course an amazing game, it was built from strategic war-gaming to provide a tactical simulation of what happens with your character. By extension, it has a great deal of mechanics to support this.

If I’m being totally honest with how I feel, the OGL and D&D SRD was probably the best and worst thing to happen to tabletop rpgs. Nearly all ttrpgs today are clones of D&D rules, albeit repackaged and often times given new forms of setting content.

Swords and Shaman was not this, we started building the game we wanted to play, with its own system and its own magic system. If anything, not an impostor.

Casting Resurrection PT 2 : Tripping and Falling

Tripping and falling.

We were still writing and producing material somewhat consistently but between 2021 and 2022 I ended up moving jobs twice. I had to learn two new, vastly different languages in a short period of time and found myself working extra time to make up.

During the same time period, our play test groups splintered a couple of times and we also found ourselves without a regular gaming group.

Then there was COVID.

Conventions began requiring masking of all attendees, but worse requiring vaccinations and proof of status. It would be hard enough to socialize with a number of players at a noisy convention table, but I couldn’t take the vaccine.

We were able to find one convention that year that would accommodate us remotely running a game and the game went incredibly well despite that. Sadly, it would be our last convention.

Then there was a wave of ideologies and present day politics injected into everything gaming.

Publishers and distributors were all promoting these political trends and fundraisers. I was concerned about where the money for fundraising might be going as well. Often times products were promoted based on this social alignment rather than merit.

This also made participation hard.

Gaming was supposed to be about bringing people together and we didn’t want to lose sight of that.

Casting Resurrection on Swords & Shaman PT 1: Promotion is Hard

It has been a few years and I’ve been seriously looking in retrospect to the state of the IP, what we wanted it to be and where it landed.

Promotion is Hard.
One thing I didn’t realize was how hard it would be to put a product into people’s minds in such a crowded space. I thought, if we made a fun project that people could relate to, it would take off.

Between beta and go live we had to make a name change. We actually applied for trademark for a name (and were awarded it), but we found later another game had the same name. We basically ate the money for the trademark because it didn't feel right to take it. We sat up all night literally rebranding everything.

I also suffered a bit of impostor syndrome, devaluing our own work, which is not good. We worked very hard on this project, but I never felt confident or correct in crowdfunding. We even gave away hundreds of virtually free copies of the rules as ‘beta’. All this was on the hopes that the ‘merit’ would help carry the project.

Except we had no advertising venues, and the podcasts which I hosted weekly for a year were primarily targeting OSR players. Compounding that, I did very little self promotion on those podcasts. I always felt like I was being pushy.

That left conventions. We didn’t have physical copies to sell, the publisher was DTRPG, and so a booth was a waste of space. We had to get a gaming table and run the game.

This is where Swords & Shaman really shined. Our table always seemed to be the ‘fun’ place to be. People repeatedly told us that our game was the most fun they had at the con.

Except that we could only do a few conventions yearly, and some conventions weren’t receptive to indy games.