Congrats to Paizo/Goblinworks on funding their Pathfinder Online game. They came in at just under $1.1 million. Again, if PO was going to be Pathfinder rules based rather than Golarion Online, I would be all over it, but an EVE style PvP MMO isn't what I want. I was slightly interested in the Emerald Spire megadungeon they are creating. And I'm impressed with the talent they have working on the game.
Congrats to Gamesmiths, LLC for succesfully getting Legends of Sinbad funded. It doubled what they were asking, and opened my eyes to how hard it is for small start-ups to get funding on projects. Something I'll have to watch for when I try to do Unleashed.
We're over halfway to our Young Centurions goal! That means it's time for us to reveal the next goal at $285,000: the Fate system adaptation of The Day After Ragnarok, exploding at you like gigaton-class mindbomb from Kenneth Hite and Leonard Balsera!
This is post-apocalyptic pulp
like no other! Mighty-thewed barbarians and grim mercenaries roam the
desolate plains of Ohio. Giant snakes, and those who worship them, prowl
the ruins of St. Louis. Pirates battle Japanese invaders in the South
China Sea. Bold British agents, equipped with experimental ophi-tech,
thwart the insidious infiltration of Stalin's humanzees. Sky-raiders
strike from hidden bases in the Sahara, deros skulk in South American
caverns, and the Texas Rangers fight electrical death worms to save Los Alamos.
Kenneth
Hite presents a world of savage swords and rocket men, of were-serpents
and war-apes, from Australia's battered Empire to the proud city-state
of Chicago. And across it all lies the trillion-ton corpse of the Midgard Serpent, killed by atomic fire but still poisoning the Earth with every passing night. Welcome to the world at the end of the world!
With this Fate Core translation, you'll be able to use The Day After Ragnarok as an alternate timeline-gone-wrong backstory for your Shadow of the Century game! The Fate Core Edition of The Day After Ragnarok
will include the tale of how the Century Club went down fighting the
Midgard Serpent. Learn how Jet Black flew the atomic bomb into the
Serpent's mouth to end the fight, and read the sad and tragic tale of
Sally Slick, the sole survivor of the battle who now wanders the
wastelands of America, keeping the spirit of the century alive for just
one more day.
Thanks to our partnership with Atomic Overmind Press
we'll bring you this stretch goal once we reach $285,000. Backers at
the EXPANSIONS level and higher will be able to receive the Fate Core
Edition of the Day After Ragnarok in PDF form for an upgrade cost of absolutely nothing. So let's bring on the apocalypse, folks!
OK, it's the new year, I haven't updated the Kickstarters for awhile now. So without further ado.
Legends of Sinbad Kickstarter could use some more help. It's funded, 10 days remain to hit those stretch goals. $57 to get 20 monsters added to the bestiary, that triples what's in the book to begin with. Inspired by the old Ray Harryhausen movie, Gamesmiths are providing a book with complete rules for Savage Worlds, no need to own Deluxe edition or Deluxe explorer's edition. Explorer's edition. This should provide a Fast, Fun & Furious adventure!
The Legends of Sinbad Roleplaying Game provides you with several campaign and adventure ideas, dozens of new magical treasures and thrilling monsters, fully fleshed-out NPCs and organizations to serve as reoccurring antagonists, a map and information on the kingdoms and empires of the Seven Seas, as well as mysterious locations such as the City of Brass, the lost island of Lemuria, and the Fountain of Destiny!
Grab your astrolabe, sharpen your scimitar, and set sail for the Seven Seas in The Legends of Sinbad!
As the kickstarter for one of my favorite systems out there pushes past the halfway mark for completion, 26 days remain, and lots of Stretch Goals remain as well. Check this out: Look at how much you get for $10!!! PDFs galore, enough to run FATE in nearly every genre.
Fate Accelerated is the Basic Core system, without so many examples, kind of a cool goal, especially useful to get kids into the system.
Then at $235,000 DO: Fate of the Flying Temple, a FATE Accelerated product.
Adapting the setting of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple to the Fate Accelerated Edition, this unlockable goal will feature tiny worlds, big hearts, young heroes, a lost temple, and trainable dragons. The PDF will be made available to all backers at $10 and up if funded.
The buy-in to get 'something' is $1. That means you get the advanced draft copy of the Core rules. Before the Kickstarter end concludes in 60 days. Luckily I'll have time to scrounge up some cash, cuz this is going BIG!!!
Fate started as a "house rules" project for the Fudge system during a car ride Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks had back in 2001. After seeing some success with it in their home games, they created a free, downloadable version for anyone who cared to grab it. They figured a few dozen people would have a look. Instead, hundreds did, and it fast became one of the most popular variants of Fudge out there, spawning its own thousands-strong discussion list and eventually helping to launch Evil Hat as a commercial game company.
From there, Fate grew into new revisions and iterations, showing up in Evil Hat's own Spirit of the Century in 2006 and the Dresden Files RPG in 2010 (each one leading to a temporary shortage in the supply of Fudge dice as demand spiked), as well as dozens of third-party Fate games and a few other popular games that borrowed ideas from Fate, if not the whole system.
Today, Evil Hat is proud to bring you Fate Core: the latest evolution of the Fate role-playing game system. Inside you'll find refined, clearer language about every part of the game -- ranging from streamlined language about aspects and skills, to a unified approach for game actions and outcomes, to our trademark, rock solid GM and player advice.
Simply put, Fate Core is the best version of Fate we can possibly make, built upon over a decade of play and design experience by Evil Hat, and with the Fate player community at large, taking the best lessons from all of gaming and distilling them into a cohesive, compelling whole.
With Fate Core, you'll be able to drive right to the heart of your characters, using simple-yet-deep rules to make the most of those stories. Throughout, you'll use Fate Core's mechanics to model how fiction, not physics, operates, producing an experience that's better than "realistic" -- it's authentic.
After the kickstarter campaign concludes and the game's text, art, and layout are finalized, the PDF of Fate Core will be made available to everyoneon a "pay what you like" scheme. We'll also be selling a printed version of the game, and will use the system to power upcoming games like the Atomic Robo RPG.
Upon publication we'll place near to 100% of the Fate Core text into the Open Gaming License as open content, once again continuing our commitment to supporting third party efforts to build the Fate games everyone wants to see.
In the meantime, as a backer of this Kickstarter campaign, you will get immediate, early access to the laid out text of Fate Core as it currently stands (see the link right below the video). You will have the opportunity to tell us what you think, and help us determine the final shape of the game.
It's an exciting time for Fate, and for Evil Hat, and we hope you'll join us as a backer, a fan, and a member of the Fate community. Let's rock this thing!
cover art by Kurt Komoda
We've set the project timeline on this to the maximum because we want a solid two months for our backers to have a look at the Fate Core preview, give it a whirl, and let us know what they think. We'll be iterating through the feedback you give us in that time to make any necessary tweaks to the text and the layout.
As project funding progresses, we'll continue our efforts to get the art buy and execution put together for Fate Core. At launch time we don't expect to have all of our art done, of course -- but we believe in getting a head start when we can afford to do so. Depending on complexity and speed of execution, art creation and placement into layout may run past the end of the Kickstarter campaign; we're giving it about a month.
Once the art is in and the text and layout are final, we'll charge hard on getting the print run complete. We'll be going with one of our established, fast-on-execution-and-quality domestic book printers for this. Setup and proofing will eat a week; manufacture shouldn't run much longer than a month, if that.
After that point, it's all about shipping, which is probably the most potentially elastic part of our timeline. But we'll be shipping out the copies we owe to all of our backers before we put the book on sale anywhere else.
Signed copies, consultations, and fudge dice will take a bit longer to get out there, due to the added steps involved.
The PDF: As a backer of this project at any level, you'll get immediate access to the early preview PDF (see the link at the top of this page, under the video) before the kickstarter campaign even concludes.The final PDF that will be released after the conclusion of the kickstarter will be available on a "pay-what-you-like" basis -- which includes free for those so inclined. (But folks who don't back this project will have to wait a few months before they'll get to see that.) We're doing this because we want you to see what's already been done -- and for you to get a chance to provide us critical feedback that will improve the game in its final form.
The HARDCOVER Book: Those backing at $30 and higher will receive a6"x9" formatted hardcover, black and white interior version of the Fate Core rule-set, with a page count somewhere in the lower 300 range.
The Digital Expansions: Backers at $10 or higher will get access to adigital expansion pack that starts with a fantasy adventure playable with Fate Core. Our stretch goals on this kickstarter will add more expansionsinto that pack at no additional cost to the backers! The higher we soar, the more awesome the expansion set gets. After the kickstarter concludes, each individual PDF in this expansion pack will sell for about $5 each, so this has a chance of being a real steal.
Fred's Fudge Dice Stash: Folks who pick a reward that includes Fred's Stash will get four fudge dice of one random color (i.e., all four dice will be the same color, and that color will be picked randomly) included with a signed-by-Fred copy of the Fate Core book. The six colors include the three bronze, copper, and gold tones of Grey Ghost Games' Olympic Fudge Diceset, and the translucent red, translucent blue, and glow-in-the-dark yellow-green of the no-longer-availableWizard Fudge Dice set that Evil Hat produced.
Fred's stash includes the largest quantities of the front row pictured here (the Wizard dice), and a smaller number of the back row (the Olympics). We will try to take requests if it seems feasible, but can't offer any guarantees about the color you'll get. Supplies will dictate!
The Consultation: Got a particular thing you want to do with Fate Core for your home game? We'll pair your ideas with an Evil Hat approved expert who will help you sort out your Fate Core implementation for your home game, and will also write up to 2,000 words so you'll have an official reference document to work from. Part of your contribution will be used to pay the experts for their time and wordsmithery. You'll share rights to the document with Evil Hat, or we can simply agree to enter it into the available open content surrounding Fate Core (assuming it's viable for us to do so) -- your call. This will be carried out either by a Skype call or an exchange of emails (or a mix of both), as fits the schedule of those involved. If it turns out your ideas exceed what's feasible in 2,000 words, consider this a starting point rather than a total solution -- but we'll do our best to cover the essentials!
We have a number of stretch goals in mind. Below, we reveal some of the ones that lie ahead. Stay tuned for updates as the project continues to learn of more!
Vote for your favorite gaming items before GenCon. I already voted, I'm not going to list all the nominees, publishers, categories, if you're familiar with the Ennies, you know what to do. If you've never voted, well go check out the site and vote for your favorites!
If you know who Evil Hat Productions is, then you're most likely aware of how much Ryan Macklin has been involved in the Evolution of the FATE system. Ryan is moving on to other projects and is no longer a part of Evil Hat Productions.
However congratulations to Mike Olson for landing a writing position alongside Brian Engard of Wild Blue fame as they join the FATE Core team!
Pretty cool because Mike has come up with some epic concepts for this specific game. The pyramid of skills isn't present in its current incarnation, and Mike has emphasized quick character creation over advancement, to make this game play like the Atomic Robo comics. When you want to come up with some character's background, you can go back and play an earlier episode in the character's life. If the other characters aren't in that story, no problem, you just create some other characters instead and run with it. Organizations will be a major way in which your characters advance, granting different aspects to the characters by being members of the organization. (Remember this is an Alpha version and nothing is set in stone)
This game does use FUDGE dice rather then d6s like Legends of Anglerre. I prefer the FUDGE dice even though it does mean a different type of die you need to own, but you only need 4 to play, so it's not very expensive. Besides FUDGE dice are simple to use.
So Mike said he used Kerberos Club as one of his references, but he didn't use a lot from it, one of the things he kept which I really like is the Collateral Damage rules. Makes for a really interesting scene when you let a Robot crush the floor under you instead of crushing your head! Then of course you fall through. I will definitely be watching what's going on with great interest.
Stunts are in, refresh is out, in keeping with the simple system. (currently, who knows what the FUTURE MAY BRING!)
The first PUBLIC play-test will be at GenCon:
If you're eager to check out Atomic Robo's progress, we'll be conducting the first public playtests at GenCon in August. It looks like we ("we" being Andy Blanchard, Chris Czerniak, Morgan Ellis, and myself) will be offering six scheduled sessions between us:
Thursday, August 16th at 2:00 pm Friday, August 17th at 2:00 pm (two sessions) Saturday, August 18th at 12:00 pm Saturday at 2:00 pm (two sessions)And possibly a Sunday game as well. Odds are also good that you'll see some ARRPGgames at Games on Demand, too. You can find all of them in the schedule as Atomic Robo: Sneak Preview. Not an evocative name, maybe, but it gets the point across. The blurb's the same for all of them:
Action! Science! Robots! Playtest the new RPG adaptation of the hit indie comic book series Atomic Robo, coming soon from Evil Hat. No experience with FATE or higher-dimension mathematics required.
