New titan art, anti-canon design, Windfall sketch map, map plans, old titan art, brief thoughts on mechanics, and the impact of the Wicked Ones Kickstarter
about 2 years ago – Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 07:32:47 PM

Hey everyone!  I know it's been a while since I checked in and sorry about the absence. I've been doing other things, which I'll talk about down below.  First, let's jump into some of the good stuff. I've actually got a ton of stuff to talk about that's been rolling around in my head and, well, I'm just going to dump it all train of thought here without overthinking this post too much so grab on - we're in for a hell of a ride.

Shatter, the Fractured Seed

Within each sentinel core, there is a seed - a human, imprinted through rote memorization and ritual with the commands that will later control the sentinel in its task. This gives the sentinel a kind of consciousness and awareness - and also singlemindedness, somewhat easy to exploit once you've figured it out. This human is called the seed. 

However, the seed is a weak point in the design process. The imprinting process is meant to wipe away their own volition, but sometimes remnants of the soul they were before remain. It's a tough thing giving up oneself to become part of something greater - and an even tougher thing if you felt that you had no choice or the choice was literally forced upon you. Sometimes, this soul is looking for a way out, for revenge, or for something else.

Anti-Canon Worlds

What corrupted the seed within Shatter? Well, that's for you to figure out. In the book, I'll lay out some ideas - some firm ideas of what actually might be going on, but others are just prompts for you as a GM or perhaps as a group to ponder and decide. Let's talk about anti-canon worlds. Luke Rejec, writer of Ultraviolet Grasslands, has a cool article on this design process. It's a neat read and I draw some inspiration from it in my own design.  

He explains this better than I ever could, but basically it's this: I've never been a fan of picking up other people's fully fleshed out settings and playing in them. As cool as the fiction is sometimes, I always end up bristling and fighting against anything I can't make my own. In my design process, I embrace that. With my previous game, Wicked Ones (monsters building a dungeon), we just laid out basic sandboxes - visual maps of regions and gave no more information. It was entirely up to the table to go around and figure out what each point of interest on the map might mean and, in doing so, they were determining the types of factions and elements within the fiction that they wanted to interact with. And you know what? It was really fucking awesome! It created amazing stories that we got to hear on our #play-reports channel on our Discord. Because the truth, I think, is that no matter how good a writer someone is, the GM and the table are always going to buy in even harder into something that they create themselves.

Now, Wicked Ones and Relic are really different. WO is a game about destroying a region - the stability of the fiction doesn't really matter. It doesn't need to make all that much sense as the PCs are going to be a wrecking ball through it all anyway. The players get to define what their version of "fantasy" means and the power level scope of the story they're telling. It's a knob they can turn to adjust the fiction to their taste.

But Relic is different...  there needs to be an underlying logic and framework behind the titans, establishing firmly how strong and difficult to fight they are, how they function on a basic level. There also needs to be some reasoning for why the island of Windfall exists in its post-apocalyptic state with scattered Havens and Enclaves, where these people came from before, what the wildhearts are, and all that. But at the same time, I want people making the world their own - because that's where the fun is!  If I tell you exactly why Shatter above became a revenant, that story might be cool, but it's not gonna be nearly as fun or memorable for your group as figuring it all out on your own even if the end result means the fiction is a bit more janky and less cohesive. It's your own private game and there's a lot that can be handwaved to smooth that stuff over.

SO HERE'S WHAT WE'RE DOING

I lay out the fiction up until the start of the game, about 80-100 years after the cataclysmic events on Windfall. But when I say "lay out the fiction," I mean that I have a version of it that makes a lot of sense to me - and I allude to that version throughout the text and use that version to guide my design process as I lay out the maps. But even within the books, different versions of that past exist. One haven on Windfall is going to have a very different perception of it than an outlander Enclave does. And this is just the base book.  Let's take a second to remember what fiction we're exploring:

•  In the Relic core book, we explore Windfall and take on the role of the Wendari - the Windlanders, the survivors (called outlanders by the Havenfolk) of the cataclysmic events that happened on Windfall, clinging to life in small enclaves generally hidden. The people on Windfall come originally from Vantage, some 80 years prior - another island in a vast sea, which once considered itself the only land in the world until Windfall was discovered. A rapid gold-rush like period of colonization and dabbling in ancient forbidden rites led to the creations of sentinels to fight off gigantic god-like creatures of nature, the wildhearts. Things go awry, as they do, and the civilization they were building there fell apart, creating an apocalypse. Some survived in Havens - three of them, built around Cores - wild essence energy siphoned from the land itself, contained and used to fuel incredible machines (and titans). The Havens are your enemies - they are heavily resistant to outsiders.
•  In Wartorn, we explore the battlelines in the Great War on Vantage. we're at the same point in history - 80 years after the cataclysm, but we're back on Vantage. We're thrown into a warzone, a three-front war between the Ashari (Ashlanders), Rokari (Rocklanders), and Lifari (Leaflanders). These are the three peoples of Vantage, who for a millennium had maintained a stable balance and peace but unique cultural identity with each. The discovery of Windfall by the Ashari upset that balance and as the colonies on Windfall fell, the Ashari brought back with them the cores used to build sentinels there. With this new technology, they upset that balance and took control of Vantage, subjegated the other two peoples.  But humans are resilient and a few years prior to the recommended start of the game's timeline, a massive uprising happened and threw the three nations into a Great War, culminating in a WWI-like stalemate. We take on the role of a spec-ops team that moves around, through, and behind enemy lines to take down the titans the enemy is deploying. Or at least, that's the recommended start - one of many ideas I'll throw out there!
•  In Sea of Stars, we go from island to island and deal with the gods and demons who have awakened from their long slumber. We're far off from Vantage and Windfall, in a gigantic spiral archipelago, the fountain from which all life sprang. We take on the role of champions of our islands, sent off to discover why a time of change is occurring and strive to settle the hearts of these enormous beasts for the safety of our people.

Still with me? I told you this was going to be kind of rapid fire and train of though - but trust me, this is all coming together beautifully in the book. It's just a lot to kind of get into in one post. I want to impress upon you, though, that we have been working relentlessly on this to make something very cool, a framework for you all to make your own. I'm not interested at all in you telling the stories I want you to tell - I'm interested in you using some of my ideas and expanding upon them, making something truly your own. 

I put down some framework, draw some solid lines (There is an island called Windfall that was colonized mostly by one culture from the home islands of Vantage), and then let go of it for you to do as you will. We're deep in the process and things are a bit chaotic even within our own vision, but that's where we strive in the design process... I just absolutely suck at taking time like this to explain where I'm at to you all.  Okay, let's talk about something else...

Windfall Sketch Map (and maps in general)

Relic is a game of exploration and maps are a huge part of that. I myself am a HUGE fan of having maps as a way to put all players on the same page. They're a grounding point for the fiction. Getting the level of detail and zoom-level of a map right is a real challenge and one we struggled with and FINALLY FIGURED OUT with Relic.  Let me show you the failure, because it's still pretty freaking cool:

This was a VERY long process to get the map to this point - we wanted Windfall to be about the exploration of biomes, distinct regions across this island that are fun to wander through. The titans you find there, the wildlings that inhabit it, the fauna and flora of each being distinct.  Wartorn and Sea of Stars are different and I'll talk about them in later updates, but with Windfall - it's very much a game of exploration.

So we wanted this massive map, but we also NEEDED a lot of detail - detail that, as an anti-canon world, the players can hang their stories upon. But the zoom level was all wrong for this - we couldn't find a good compromise. So while we (and by we, I mostly mean Victor) banged our heads against this thing for a very long time, we finally did realize that our approach was wrong.  We didn't need one map - we needed 8 maps, one per biome!  And then a more vague, overall version of Windfall just to show spatially where these are all in relation to each other.

Now, I don't have those maps to show right now... we're prototyping them, but our previous work on Wicked Ones sandbox maps and their zoom level is a pretty clear indication of where we're going with these. They're PACKED with small details that you can grab onto and make scenes with without us needing to define them. It's all very visual - and this is what I like. I'm not a big big fan of reading text blocks, "In box 4A, you'll come across a broken windmill that has started to divert the water in the stream. A group of goblins have now made it their home." etc. etc. - I just need a small pic of a broken windmill and me and the other players can start making up the rest.  For me, maps provide the perfect prompts for this. So that's the direction we're heading...

Now I'm going to break one of my own rules and show you the really crappy concept maps I draw out myself that I usually show to Victor to help get us on the same page. This one's a bit old, with some titan names being different than where we've landed with them but I think it shows the direction we're heading in more clearly. 

Ignore all those names and stuff, they're all just placeholders, but this is helping us get a better sense at how spread out everything is and what we might encounter.  Each of these regions are the biomes and they will each have their own map. We're reworking the larger map at the moment to accommodate building each region as a biome instead. We're doing the individual maps now and working our way backwards to what the overall "Windfall" map looks like to help them fit better together.

Speaking of breaking rules and looking through my own bad mockups of what these maps might look like, here's what I'm thinking about for Wartorn:

Yeah, I'm not gonna explain much about this now...  but I think it shows clearly where gameplay in Wartorn is heading. :)

Old Titan Art

So switching gears a bit, I did want to share with you some of the old titan art that we finished but have since decided to "abandon".  We're moving on with Victor's Wicked Ones-based style - it works better for our process and it's kind of becoming his signature style as he hones in on it more and more. I love the new pieces and think they're the right look.

But what do we do with this old art?  The current plan is to package it up into a small supplement, maybe include a tiny island scenario absolutely packed with these titans - just a nice extra bit of content for backers as a thank you for sticking around through this design process grind. It gets messy behind the scenes and while I'm happy to talk about it, it's a bit difficult to communicate that while it does seem chaotic, we do have a vision. Anyway, I appreciate your patience on that.  So here's three more titan pics that will make their way into that supplement: 

Yeah, I know those are pretty cool. But they were also brutal to design - iterating on them took forever and just did not work for us. So as cool as the finals look, moving back to the style that works better for us as a team is the right choice. Still, it'll be fun laying out these titans for everyone to see in that supplement!

Character Sheet and Mechanics

So I actually wanted to get into the character sheet and share with you our approach to mechanics design with Relic. But considering how long and rambling this has got it, I'm going to save that for my next post in a week or two. I'd like to present those things with slightly more clarity, I think.

The basic gist of it is that we're building a base system and then using perks (abilities, signature items, companions, powers) that each playbook can take as a kind of asymmetrical design. Each of these can have their own highly specialized mechanics baked into them that can drastically change how gameplay plays out.

One example I'd like to give of this is the mechanics behind the Crankshot Anchor, a signature item that the Gearhead playbook can take.  When you launch the crankshot, you start with a 6d6 pool "Hold". You immediately roll it and remove any failures (1-3 results). If you still have dice left in the pool, the titan is still held in place as you indicated (maybe an arm tethered, a leg, etc.).   Each time the fiction demands that the hold is tested, you roll them again. It creates this fantastic sense of tensions as you never know exactly how long your tether is going to hold!  You might only get a roll or two out of it, but sometimes that last 1d is absolutely tenacious and the titan just can't escape its grip. This little mechanic allows us to capture what the crankshot is all about - and we want the perks to feel like this, each very different in how they operate and to evoke the right emotions and scenes when they're put into use. 

So the design approach is basically - keep the base mechanics simple, but build complexity and asymmetry into the perks. But wow do I have a hell of a long post to write up all about this next time, so I'll save most of that for then.

The Wicked Ones Kickstarter

So most of you have probably seen that we're running another Kickstarter right now for Wicked Ones and its expansion Undead Awakening. I was asked in the comments on this Kickstarter if that was interfering with Relic's development and I wanted to get into that a bit.  I'll start by saying that the WO+UA KSer is a very good thing for Relic's future and I'll just organize my thoughts in a series of bullet points.

• First off, yes. It is taking time away from Relic development - kind of. I've been very focused on it the last month and have another week or so until it's sent off for print and then I basically never touch it again. That would have been time spent on Relic. So it took time away there, but...
• This Kickstarter let us get our printing and fulfillment chain completely solidified. This is all boring backend business stuff that I basically would have to do at the end of Relic's development. With WO, I originally just used digital release and print-on-demand, but with Relic we're making offset print books. Since WO and UA are already finished, they serve as the perfect test run for this entire process. If we hit any problems, it's going to be while fulfilling WO+UA...  then later when it comes time to fulfill Relic, this should all go very smoothly!  We're also making tons of retail connections and have wholesale distribution set up now (plus webstore fulfillment!), so the rollout for Relic is just going to be more profitable for us in the end. This lets us keep doing what we want to do - make awesome games.
• I'm not sure if you've noticed, but WO+UA Kickstarter funded very well.  With Relic's funding, we had enough to work on development and we basically had to hope that longterm sales would pay for our work on the book - just as the original WO has. But the WO+UA KSer has now given our studio financial stability to weather any hiccups that come up. We're no longer a single disaster away from collapse like every other small indie studio - we now can take two or three big hits. :)  But long story short, the Kickstarter gave us stability we sorely needed. That peace of mind opens up space in our brains for Relic development.
• The attention that WO+UA KSer has brought to Bandit Camp has also increased Relic's funding!  The late backing page is still up and there's been a strong uptick in late backers. Plus once this campaign wraps up, I'll send out a pretty strong sell to the new backers we have and ask them to join us for the ride on Relic. It just means a bigger community for the game and more funding to pour into its development.

With all of that said, you might want to consider backing Wicked Ones and Undead Awakening as well. They're great games and fulfilling very fast - delivery should be in December. You'll get to see firsthand the quality you can expect with Relic and, frankly, we are really proud of the work we've done with those games. They've also VERY heavily influenced our design decisions with Relic as we build our own system, largely based on our experience with WO and modifying the Forged in the Dark engine more towards our cinematic storytelling tastes. But even just as GM resources (sandbox maps, fiction first-style gaming advice, and so on), they're a wonderful tool - and they will look cool as hell on your shelf.

Oh, and there's also two dice sets available that will be fully compatible with the way dice rolls work in Relic as well!  So that might be worth picking up. :)

Alright, that's it for now.  I'm sure I missed some stuff or there might be some half-thoughts up there. I warned you going in that I was just going to ramble my way through this post as I've just been meaning to dump these thoughts here for quite some time. Relic had some hiccups but we overcame them, then came up with a plan to stabilize the logistics side of our business to help us in the longterm, and we're very, very excited to dive back in 100% on Relic development after September 7th when all of the WO+UA stuff gets sent off to print.

If you have any thoughts or questions, please feel free! I'm always around to answer them.  Publishing this now without previewing it, so hopefully it's coherent. :)

- Ben

Relic: Big Changes in the Artstyle
over 2 years ago – Mon, Jul 04, 2022 at 05:49:15 AM

Hey everyone,

So updates have been few and far between for a while, but it's kind of because we had to chug through some tough decisions and then see where they led. I didn't want to write updates, then revise them, etc. a bunch - just wanted to decide on the course forward and then let everyone know what's up. So today, that's what I'm doing.  This is going to be a public post, even though it contains some awesome artwork, as I'd like people new to Relic to see the changes going on as well.

We've decided to switch art styles - back to the style Victor and I worked with on Wicked Ones. For Relic, we first approached it with a more detailed, textured style and kinda found ourselves struggling to have the same vision on pieces.  The style also meant that changes and iterating on pieces took way too long - each art piece was a bit of a grind.  We also had perspective issues and properly showing the environments alongside the titans themselves.  Overall, it was hard for Victor and I to come together and make that work smoothly - which I think surprised us both and it took us way too long to admit it.

As a test, we decided to build a revenant titan in the Wicked Ones style - a style we'd worked together within for 2 years.  Instantly, it became clear that our tastes in that style were much more similar, that it was WAY easier for me (Ben) to communicate what I was imagining within that style, and iterating was rapid.  In that style, Victor can send me over a "final" candidate piece and we can hammer away at it making alterations and have the final piece done in an hour or so usually. With the previous style, this took far, far longer.

It's hard to explain, but the road before was bumpy but the change in art style just works out a lot better for us. Here are three titans we've made in that style and I'm not sure how you all are going to feel about them, but I fucking love them:

Glimmer, the Figment of Imagination

A wildheart that roams the Glowwood, able to slip into a copse of trees and disappear completely. Many have sworn to have seen it, but it's almost impossible to find if you're actually looking for it. The glowwood itself is a formidable maze of essence infused flora and fauna, creating a dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish biome of which Glimmer is the master of.

Catalyst, the Blightbringer

This revenant stomps through the remnants of Blighttown near the original wild essence extractors. When the extractors first collapsed, Catalyst rose and destroyed the prosperous central hub and essence mining facility that the Ashari people had set up in the center of Windfall. 

Gnaw, the Ravenous Harvester

Gnaw was one of the first Sentinels created, in the southwest of Windfall. Its purpose was to harvest the massive Deepwood forest and rapidly prepare lumber for shipment back to Vantage, the homeland, to be used to fuel the fires of industry. Its design shows a clear mix of coretech powering its limbs and structure and steamtech with its sawblade with its constant need to be fed lumber to keep it powered. Now, Gnaw is stuck in a loop - endlessly harvesting and creating piles of lumber that the Deepwood regrows. Its mere existence, however, throws the entire region it roams out of balance.

Process Changes and Feedback

The process on these titans has been MUCH more pleasant for both Victor and myself. We're pumped to work on them, our artistic visions mostly match up, and they allow us to create better senses of scale and incorporation within the environment. And best of all is that they are very, very easy to iterate towards the end allowing us to both feel good about the final pieces.  On our end, the change has been incredibly positive and makes us wonder why we ever thought moving away from this art style was a good idea, since we both liked it so much anyway.

We're open to discussion and criticism about this change in artistic style, of course, but we won't be moving back to the old style. Transparency is big, I know - and this one might feel like I'm pulling the rug out from under people who really liked the old style. I'm very sorry about this. I made the final call on making the switch back to the old style and also decided not to consult the backer community about it beforehand, as it essentially was something Victor and I had to decide for ourselves. Of course, there are some that might like the change better so that's nice for them!  But again, I'm sorry about the lack of communication on this one.

Upcoming Updates

These are in no particular order, but some posts that will be coming soon:

•  3 or 4 Old-Art-Style Titans: I'm going to post up some other pieces in the old style. I think there are 3 or 4 titans that I never showed you drawn in that style.  We don't want to redraw any of these titans - instead, the plan is to package them all up into their own small supplement. What that basically means is *free content*.  They're really cool and I'm looking forward to sharing them.
•  Windfall WIP Map: After that post, I'm going to post up our in-progress map of Windfall. It's coming together really awesome, with each area/biome becoming way more well-defined. As we fit different settlements and titans into them, the land becomes more real as well.  I have a lot to say on worldbuilding and anti-canon design, where all I want to do is create a loose framework for the table to fill in a lot of the details.  I'll save that for then, though.
•  Mechanics Overview: We took a really deep dive on the mechanics and have reworked a great deal. It's working well in playtesting - especially the titan fighting. One of the biggest hurdles was movement (especially vertical) and the zooming in and out cinematically on scenes - this has been the focus of our development work.  Sorry again about the lack of updates, but I kinda wanted to keep the mechanics dev stuff in a narrow circle for a while until I was comfortable sharing.  I have a 2-page write-up on the mechanics and how they fit together that I want to share and talk about and will be doing so soon - and then shortly after, a playtestable version.
•  Titan Battle Sheets: We've been working on battle sheets, kind of similar to the breakdown you see in Monster Hunter.  Each titan is broken up into sections and the players can easily identify and make notes on which areas are dangerous, where weak points are, and so on. These sheets are then used during the battles themselves.

Anyway, there's still a ton of stuff going on.  I know I went hardcore radio-silence, but I kinda needed it I think.  Writing these updates is stressful, to be brutally honest, and I don't really like sharing half-formed ideas that might be changing.  On the other hand, I love sharing stuff that's really cool and I'm excited about and we've had kind of a nonstop flow of that stuff recently.  We were in a tunnel there for a while, a dark one, but we're finally coming out the other end of it and I'm ready to bring you all properly into the loop.

Speaking of Cool Stuff

We're launching a Kickstarter on August 1st to fund an offset print-run of our previous game Wicked Ones and it's soon to be released full-game expansion Undead Awakening. Most might be familiar with them, but basically you play as monsters building a dungeon (WO) or the undead leaders of an undead horde (UA).  Especially if you like the changes in the art style mentioned above, you'll LOVE what we did with WO and UA.  

 Click the image below or this link to get notified on launch!

 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/banditcamp/wo-ua-hardcover

It kinda goes without saying, but even if you just want to support us, signing up for the notification helps make it look popular and gets others to sign up, too...  so please push the button and share that link far and wide!  :)

This Kickstarter is also a nice chance for us to do a test run of the printing and fulfillment process prior to Relic's print run.  WO and UA are finished games and have been available via print-on-demand for a while, so we can focus 100% on just getting things printed and fulfilled smoothly. Then, hopefully, just repeat the process with Relic!

Overall, this doesn't take a lot of our time. Mostly, it ties Cass up a bit more with development of UA fleshing out some things we were hoping to have time for, but there's no real impact on Relic's development schedule (which is mostly limited by the amount of art).  

Final Notes

We will be ending Relic pre-orders with the culmination of the above Wicked Ones / Undead Awakening crowdfunding campaign on September 1st.  At that time, we'll send out surveys and if you'd like to update your pledge, you can do so then.  Of course, you can also share the pre-order store with anyone you think might be interested! https://relic.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Thanks for the support,

- Ben and the Bandit Camp

A small update and explanation
over 2 years ago – Tue, May 10, 2022 at 03:34:44 PM

Hey everyone, long time no update.  Sorry about that!

We did a pretty deep dive into the system, art, and so on and have been working to get things put together in a nice new playtest package. I kept putting the update off for that and it just kept not happening.

We have been very hard at work and the game is coming along nicely. Playtesting has been going well and the titan fights *feel* like titan fights - very vertical and dynamic. However, I'd just like to ask for everyone's patience on a nice, big update.  I'm not a big fan of putting out stuff halfway through.

In the meantime, here's a nice sketch of the Windfall setting: 

This isn't finished and more just getting the concepts aligned before working on the final piece.  Still, it's been fun playtesting a bit on this map and starting to flesh out the points of interest on it.

Anyway, apologies again for the way too long radio silence.  Just hang tight a bit longer and I'll write up a long, quite detailed update on where the game is going.

- Ben

January Progress Report and a personal note
over 2 years ago – Wed, Jan 05, 2022 at 11:46:35 PM

Hey everyone, Ben here!  Sorry for the long lack of communication - I sorta hunkered down and powered through the holidays, never really taking the time to get things organized in my head/on paper enough for an update.  Let's dive in...

Personal Note

One other reason that I haven't given Relic my full attention this month was that I made a pretty big life decision in early December.  From this point onward, I'm making the plunge and becoming a full-time game designer (at least for the next year, anyway).

My day job was running an English as a Second Language school here in Nagoya, Japan - one I've ran for years.  That was a fine job and I enjoyed it, but obviously my heart lies elsewhere (game design) and motivation drained away through these long last few years as Covid caused a huge drop in student recruitment.  The culmination of the business not going so well causing immense stress, my successful run with my previous project, this new Kickstarter, a nice community building up around my games, and a nice safety net with my wife's work and our savings finally motivated me to take the plunge - I'll be spending all of 2022 exclusively on game design, almost all of which will be focused on Relic.

I spent a good amount of December packing up and renovating my office space back to its original condition. It was a bit much juggling all of this at once and I backburnered Relic to some extent without mentioning it - apologies for that.  I went into the holidays free of burden though and had a great Christmas and New Year's (which is a very long holiday here).  And I've just emerged from that holiday hibernation full of motivation. :)

Progress

I created the playtest kit mostly as a proof-of-concept - it is riddled with problems (acknowledged in the document) and many of those mechanics are just one of many ideas we've been wanting to try.  We managed to keep up our playtesting sessions throughout the holidays and have made a lot of progress on ironing out several issues.

• Our main focus right now is getting the base mechanics into as close to their final form as possible and balancing out the three archetypes and six talismans. I don't want to tinker with any new content on that front until the small amount of stuff we have works *perfectly* with base mechanics.
• Our last three playtest sessions had us focusing largely on journey mechanics and creating random challenges as we traverse the world.  We've come up with a nice system of rolling 2d6, mapping one of the dice to Survival/Fury/Presence and the other to Danger/Obstacle/Opportunity to give the GM nice prompts.  This playtest also has us experimenting with spark tables for these too as well as how best to jump into scenes and use Team Actions.  There was a lot of long discussions about mechanics to do there, but like I said - we've made progress and you can expect a rules update soon.
• Another big focus of mine right now is finalizing terminology used in the game - some of it is clunky in tabletalk and this just becomes more apparent with usage, so I'm going through now and attempting to iron that out.  A lot of those terminology problems are focused around the GM's oracle dice rolls.
• In the background, we're also working on new titans (we're doing the three book cover titans at the moment!).  As those get finished up, previews will be released here.
• Eike has also dove in pretty deeply on the Roll20 sheets.  We had a slower start in December than planned, so he can only do so much right now as he's waiting on me to release a proper update to the playtest kit.
• The playtest kit update should be coming next week - but I'm going to be moving everything back over to Google docs. The nicely formatted PDF was helpful in promoting the game, but it's obviously too much of a pain to upkeep through rapid development.  When I have things moved over to a Google Doc, I'll also enable comments so people can start giving more direct feedback - which I really look forward to. :)

Hmm, this update was pretty vague and without a lot of substance, I guess, but that's also the state of the mechanics right now. I have some solid ideas that are waiting to settle just a *bit* more before they're ready to put down into writing, but I know I needed to hop on here and drop an update.  My tentative plan is to release one of these towards the beginning of each month, mostly to remind myself of my own goals over that next month and to keep a fairly regular update schedule.  Writing updates does, however, fill me with the weirdest anxiety and it's actually pretty helpful to get the big red reminder that "4 backers requested an update for Relic" - so don't hesitate to hit that button to let me know when I'm slacking.

Three last things:  

• I'll be running one-shots on Wednesday evening US-time (maybe around 6:30ish CST) starting in a week or two. My goal is to just bring in a bunch of different people and see how quickly they grab onto the mechanics, plus testing out the same titans a few times.  I'll make posts here and on the Discord when I do get these set up, so if you're interested keep an eye out!
• Either next week or the week after, I think we'll start streaming our Tuesday playtest game.  When the next rules update comes out, things will be settled enough to avoid us getting into lengthy 1-2 hour long discussions about the same thing over and over and over. :)  Should make for more watchable Actual Plays and give a better sense of what the game is about.
• Also, I was on a podcast earlier today to talk about Relic.  We kinda wander between a bunch of topics, my experience gaming, designing games, Wicked Ones, and then stuff on Relic...  I don't think any of it is really new info, exactly, but you might find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFScQsCqhrg

That's it for now. Thanks a ton for being patient through December while I got a lot of my own personal stuff figured out.

Errored Backers & Japanese Yen
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 01:16:16 PM

Here's the quick note I forgot to mention - because the Kickstarter is in Japanese yen (as I live in Japan), your banks can sometimes be a bit cautious about approving the charge.  

• If you're an errored backer and it didn't go through, a quick call to your company and re-running the card will almost always fix this up.
• If that doesn't work, it's very likely that the address you have on file isn't matching up. 

These two things solve almost all of the error problems.

- Ben