A Busy Weekend
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Descration, Developer Blog, E-RPG General Development, Fantasy Sagas, Modern SagasWell, as the title suggest, it has been a busy weekend. It started through the week, as things were developing towards the weekend itself. An Ironwood Nexus Community Member, Ralph, posted some suggestions for a game aid that I developed. I took on the roll of both Project Developer and Executive Officer this week, and I prepared for the first play test for a Fantasy Sagas Game in almost a year. It all led up to yesterday, when it all came together.
Almost 2 weeks ago I took on both business and artistic development for Ironwood. We got royalties sent out, and a host of sales organized and prepared. I also still had several projects currently under develop to reorganize to include some time for this new added duty. First thing on my agenda was simple, get ready to play!
We finally organized to follow up with a previous testing group. We reorganized the group to begin play testing of Desecration. Some player characters needed replacing as the testing for Prophecy left some characters in no shape to continue with their adventures. However, we would not jump directly into Desecration. Instead, we would first test out one randomly chosen sidetrack adventure.
The sidetrack adventures are a collection of small, single game session, mini-adventures designed to be self-contained. I had three prepared in a file folder, stapled individually. I randomly drew one out, and that was their off-shoot encounter. The primary test of the adventure was that it did not play like a simple sidetrack. It had to have enough depth to be something other than just a simple thing to throw on the road. This is no simple bandit attack or other contrivance. Instead, this adventure set the characters into a bit of a moral crossroad, where they had to choose to help someone do something they were not convinced was right, against a group of people who may be right. It all went perfectly, and smoothly.
The second point was to see if a small 8 page adventure would last long enough, or not too long. The overal adventure lasted just over 3 hours. This was more or less perfect. If the rest of the adventures work out this well then this new series should work out perfectly.
Another event that happened was that on Friday part of an order of galley proofs of some new products. The first was the Modern Sagas Player’s Guidebook. Up until now we only got to see it printed from our own printers, which offers a nice idea of how the book will look, but still has some uncertainty. Well, I received the paper back proof on Friday and it exceeded my expectations. Usually these proofs require quite a bit of layout and design changes when you are incorporating graphics into the overall layout process. The cover was beautiful, the layout perfectly represented. In short, aside from some minor proofing and editing issues, the book was everything I wanted it to be. It was also a firm reminder that while the beta is available, the book is still long from completion. I still have some work to do there.
Another key testing component this weekend was the field test of a new game aid. This aid was developed through a passing suggestion by community member only known as Ralph. He suggested a sort of combat wheel for time keeping. I had seen some of these with other systems but never really had a reference name for them. He showed some ideas which was a decent starting point. the concept was simple, take the combat aid from the GML and represent it graphically.
But that is way too simple. There is so much potential to that.
As is typical of my development style I took a simple concept and decided what would be all the things I would want in one place to make combat resolution easier. So I put all of that into an Encounter Map. I have 2 more proofs of this on the way, but I didn’t have a full size version to test last night. Instead, I tested a smaller version of it which worked perfectly. Combat was much smoother, with everything everyone needed for combat being in one place and easily accessible to everyone. I am quite happy with this new product and I can’t wait to show off the final version to you. Here is a thumbnail of the forthcoming full release:
As you can see, there is a 1 inch scale combat grid surrounded by 2 rows of colored squares. The combat grid is fairly easy to surmise, you use that to track movement, possibly with miniatures. The colored squares are used to track initiative declarations and resolutions using cards or tokens. Outside of this is listed all of the combat modifiers, action level modifiers, situation modifiers, etc. that we could fit on the bar and would affect your strategic plans. Now combined with your character sheet, you can manage almost every part of combat from one easy to reference 2×3 foot game aid.
As stated, we tested a small version, primarily for declaration and resolution tracking, and it all worked perfectly. Feedback was great and combat was resolved much more definitively and quickly, definitely ramped up the time and intensity of the encounters.
So, yes, we covered a lot of ground this weekend. We tested two new releases, as well as got to preview the print version of the Modern Sagas. I feel very fulfilled and accomplished this week. So I continue on, back to work. I have to prepare for some more touching up and development. But first, I have to take my wife out to dinner tonight. Its our 5th wedding anniversary.
Until next time,
Happy Gaming!
