A tabletop RPG of camaraderie, teamwork, exploring the wilderness, and encountering colossal titans in a world haunted by its past.
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Hey everyone,
You have probably received word from Backerkit that you will be charged for shipping. I realize the costs are higher than the original quoted rough framework I was given, but I was just operating with the information I had at that time. I asked for the info, posted it, then checked with the shipping company to get the current shipping rates, and am charging them now. All of this is completely out of our hands and I'm sorry that it's more expensive than most expected.
Concerning VAT, while I assumed it was common practice that VAT is paid by all EU/UK citizens on orders like these, the fact that I didn't state that it would be charged has caused some confusion and dissatisfaction, and in the case of several private messages and e-mails, downright anger. I don't live in a country where I deal with VAT and even the shipping center says it's a complicated mess that's difficult to handle. Anyway, I've removed the VAT charge from the upcoming Backerkit shipping charges and will be paying the VAT myself. Looking at other KSer projects, they do seem to inform people with a note ("You'll be charged for VAT later.").
I now understand better why companies like Evil Hat only ship within the U.S. as well.
The shipping is being charged quite a bit before things are actually ready to ship out as the decision was made in consultation with the shipping company to charge for this all at once alongside our other project (Wicked Ones) for the smoothest road forward. I'll have an update on the project soon.
That's it for now.
- Ben
Hey everyone,
I had a pretty unstable couple of months as my mother's health declined. I mentioned this in a previous post, but it had me going back and forth to the US a few times. In the end, she passed peacefully surrounded by family a few weeks ago. It's a comfort for my life to be returning to normal.
As part of that, I want to quickly apologize about the lack of updates. While I was working, the work was kind of all over the place...it lacked structure, as I just gravitated towards working on whatever was most interesting / least taxing for a while. That actually was a fruitful process as it got me quite excited about the game once again and I'm ready to storm into 2023 with a flurry of activity.
Anyway, the base mechanics for Relic are settled. There are some terminology issues remaining, just finalizing what to actually call things, so I don't want to give a full mechanics update until those names are decided. But I did want to give you a look at what I've been doing.
Here's the character sheet prototype. The idea behind the character sheet is that it's printed on both sides of a letter sized or A4 paper, then folded in half into a little booklet. The prototype sheet isn't pretty, as it's just exported from Google Sheets which I use to iterate quickly...and the exporting leaves a lot of weird fragments. Just ignore that stuff...this is just to give you an idea of what it'll be like. My next post is likely to go much more in-depth into speaking about mechanics, as I also want to include a front/back "Player's Guide" sheet with world info and a glossary of terms on the front/back and quick reference game mechanics on the interior pages. But anyway, as for the sheet itself:
Now looking at the character sheets (click on them for larger versions), you'll notice a LOT of new terminology I imagine. This will be explained quite a bit later, but just from looking over the sheet, you can gleem quite a bit of info. The main goal here is to encourage a very flexible conditions system coupled with depleting defenses (endurance/resolve). A character's skills and knowledge have been compacted into what are called domains and they're rolled when you Take Action to do something risky or uncertain.
Player facing mechanics are minimal, keeping them mostly focused on the fiction. There is an entire other side to this, the game that the GM will be playing with moves and a meta-currency that allows them to act against the PCs that I'll dive into in a later post.
You can also see in the Hunter Role section how a type of planning is built into the game itself, encouraging behavior instead of running around randomly. You're also encouraged to switch roles as needed for new plans or when another member of the party falls ("The anchor is down - someone get this thing's attention!" Sweeper: "I'm on it, switching over to anchor now. I'll keep it busy."). The motivation here is carrots rather than sticks, giving extra motivation in the form of meta-currency (hearts).
While it's not mentioned here, hearts can also be spent to "Jump In" and rewind the fiction a bit, attempting to save an ally or change the course of the story that's already playing out like if an ally fails a roll and starts tumbling off a titan, you can spend a heart to Jump In and grab them. The entire game has a focus on these teamwork elements, from the Hunter Roles, to the base actions that players have access to such as Jump In, to how downtimes and critical effects work. But that's a long other post that we'll get into later. Keep in mind that these sheets above are just prototypes! The final probably will look quite different, but the actual mechanics are finished. Now it's just polish.
Oh yeah, and I promised a look at another titan in the title, so here's a pic of a Sentinel in action, Bulwark. There's a lot going on in this piece that hints at some pretty interesting stuff within The Windlands... something which I intend to get into when I make the Player's Guide post, as it'll have an overview of the fiction framework. Keep in mind that this setting is anti-canon and each group will have their own unique iteration of the Windlands, but there are some overarching truths about the way titans function, the history of the people, and the geography of the land that all players will need to be on the same page for. That's what the Player's Guide booklet will hopefully accomplish.
I have so, so, so much more that I'm dying to share with you all. I'm just crap at getting it all organized into interesting posts. Anyway, thanks for giving me some breathing room as I dealt with events in my personal life and, like I said, I'm ready to storm into 2023 with a flurry of activity so stay tuned.
Oh, and you can ask questions below or on the Discord if you'd like! I'd be happy to answer them and it's usually easier to address specific curiosities people have.
Thanks a ton,
- Ben
Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of updates. The short version is that I had some family health problems to deal with over the last few weeks. The long version can be found down below...
But first off, here's a pic of a titan finished a while back by Victor - Tremor, a wildheart whose demesne covers a large swath of the Shardlands. Kickstarter is frustratingly low-res'ing this image when I upload it. The actual image is much, much crisper than this one but I give up on fixing it for now. :)
This is a bit personal, and long, but I don't mind sharing. It's also just copy/pasted from my update on the Wicked Ones offset print run Kickstarter - no need to write it twice. So if you saw the update there, there's not much new here.
In early October, I found out my mother was likely (and later confirmed) to have stage 4 lung cancer. As soon as I got the call from my sister, I immediately took my family (me, wife, two little girls) back to the US from Japan and stayed there for a few weeks. Due to covid and a gap in visiting home just prior to it, I hadn't been back to see my family in about 5 years.
Two days after arriving, we got the doctor's prognosis - 3-6 months, a year or so with treatment and luck, but maybe as little as two weeks. My mom is 57 years old... this blindsided me like nothing I've ever been through. I suppose we are lucky enough to have time to spend with her now though while she's still in relatively okay health.
In the meantime, I spent some time with my notebook concepting out a bit of the Relic fiction and titan concepts. It helped occupy my mind and wasn't really work that required a great deal of focus. I felt like I made some good progress. Obviously, Victor kept plugging away at artwork as well and we stayed in communication about new titans, plans for the biome maps, and so on. Things are moving along smoothly there.
After coming back, I thought I'd be able to fall into a rhythm but unfortunately my mother's continuing health issues meant I was on a lot of 3am phone calls this last week waiting on answers (U.S. daytime is my nighttime) and that plus jet lag just wrecked about a week's worth of steady work. I didn't do nothing, but it was hard to fall into any kind of good-progress rhythm. My mother had a surgery to alleviate some issues and things have finally stabilized - it's been weird actually getting good (well, not bad) news for once, but we'll take it.
Anyway, work is progressing nicely this week. I'm wrapping up my Wicked Ones print run, which is mostly just busy work, and starting up playtesting of Relic again next week. I will be putting out a call for Wednesday evening playtesters (US time) probably next week - I intend to run a bunch of one or two shots in that time slot to rotate through titans and test with a large amount of people. This is in addition to the regularly weekly game I run to test campaign play. I'm looking forward to those sessions.
Anyway, I apologize for not communicating this earlier - honestly, I kind of didn't know what to say or what to tell everyone about how long the delay was likely to be. I've never dealt with anything like this before. So really, I just pushed work to the back of my mind harder than I ever have. Still, I really should have given at least a quick heads up that I was disappearing, but I think I just didn't want to talk about a situation that I was really going into blind.
Anyway, sorry and thanks again for supporting the project. I'm happy to finally be getting back to my usual work routine.
- Ben
Hey everyone,
You probably noticed that you received a survey today! The late backing store and pledge manager will be closing in one week (9/27)! For information on upgrading your pledge level, you can check here: https://help.backerkit.com/article/596-how-to-switch-into-another-pledge-level
The late backing store for WO+UA is also open. This was the book we made before Relic and we have decided that we will not put this book into retail distribution or sell it on our webstore - this is your only chance to get it in high-quality. Moving forward, it will only be available as a PDF or softcover, standard quality book via DTRPG. It is a *very* complete book with a few supplements. We have nothing left to add to it, but we also want to move forward with a different system (Relic). We don't want to spend a lot of time promoting an older game built on the Forged in the Dark framework. So once fulfillment is done, that's it for WO and we're focusing 100% on Relic.
Anyway, if you do want to grab those books, you can do so here:
https://relic.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
I have a lot of stuff I want to post about, but honestly I've been a bit wrapped up in the nitty-gritty of Kickstarter fulfillment. It's a grind and I haven't had time to properly post up another update I had planned. Give me another week or two to get some breathing room and write up a proper take on where the mechanics are heading.
All for now, thanks everyone!
- Ben