Hey everyone, Reecius back from a long trip away to the LVO (our big, annual tabletop convention) and a family trip to visit my in-laws. I was working the entire time though, no worries, and have some updates for the overall project.
House Keeping: I will get another in-depth article done this week before I have to hit the road again on the 14th and will be covering the Bard which I have been excited to review for you all. After that I have to head back to Vegas for a week for our annual team administration meeting for Frontline Gaming, then I am off to GAMA. If anyone will be at GAMA, please stop by booth #341 and say hi, we will have some of the Blood Throne goodies to show off. Communications may be slow during the period of the 14-29th of this month while I am traveling for work.
General Update: We are steadily working through the remaining items to finish before manufacturing can begin. At this point we are polishing remaining items such as editing cards, books, etc. and preparing them for printing. We had some extra space on the card cut sheets so we decided to add in a general reference card for each class that gives you some commonly used rules at a glance. We made them generic as well so that if you have the Hero Expansion book allowing you to make custom heroes, all the options you may need to reference during play for each class are available at your fingertips.
We also finalized the Hero Sheets, which are like Character Sheets in DnD. These ended up being a lot more complex than previously thought. These are in the Campaign Workbook, which also ended up being a lot bigger and more complex than initially thought, in which you can write allowing you to track all data during the campaign. The Hero Sheet has everything that happens under the hood so to speak to manage your hero’s data as you progress through the campaign. What made it so much more challenging to get done than thought was to not only track all date but make it easy for you to see on one page everything you need to level up! We have one customized for each Hero with all of their starting stats, feats, equipment, etc. pre-input for you so you only have to worry about leveling up as you go.
There is an instruction page in the Quickplay Guide that shows you how to use this, but once you understand it this is an all-in-one guide for each hero. We put in all the starting stats for each hero with areas for you to write over any stats that may increase with leveling, even potential upgrades for your weapons and armor at the forge once you build the Blacksmith in your siege camp. Below is a WIP but very close to the final version. When you level up a hero and a gameplay stat improves, you place a token in the corresponding slot on the Hero Board which is a more compact version of the hero’s information containing only what you need to play the game, thus making the system more manageable while playing. It also allows for any permutation in how you choose to level up your individual heroes! The Hero Board itself is color coordinated to match any dice that may go with a particular stat and we went through many iterations to make the layout intuitive with the most used stats centrally located.
This system was a complex equation to solve for but we are very pleased with the results!
EDIT: Thanks to backer Walter for reminding me to add this, we will have blank, fillable PDF versions of these on the Blood Throne site for custom heroes! I hope to be able ot make them so they do all the math for you but I am educating myself as to if that is possible in a PDF, but as a baseline we will have blanks so you can make your custom heroes nice and tidy with this format!
The Campaign Workbook is nearing completion, we are in the polish stage now.
In addition to the full color 3D map for each scenario in the Rule Book, the Campaign Workbook gives you a simplified version of the maps for ease of setting up the map. In the Rule Book you can read the overview for each scenario once they become available on the Campaign Map, but you don’t get all the details. You have to fish for clues in the flavor text as to what to expect but typically you will see your objective and any important details your scouts and spies may have been able to glean for you in advance. This means when you select which heroes you will use for the scenario, you do not have perfect knowledge of what to expect in the actual scenario which we felt added a layer of depth and made it feel more realistic as the heroes would not have a magic ball to see what exact monsters they would be facing before arriving!
Below is a WIP version, we have further refined these in preparation for printing to make it even easier to log all data, but this gives you an idea of what the final version will look. (It is black and white because it is printed on paper meant to be written on just as an FYI.)
We decided to include images of each monster to make it really simple to pick them out of the plastic organizer tray. This did make the Campaign Workbook much bigger than we originally thought though as we now have 3 pages per scenario but the quality is much improved so we deemed it a good choice although it has caused this part of the project to take longer.
We have organized the campaign worksheets as such to make it easy to track all objectives achieved, hero XP and monster HP in each scenario (although you can also just use HP tokens on the board next to the monster which is what most players do, but for those that want a less cluttered play surface we added this option). These also serve as a record for your campaign in the instance you lose track of where you were in the course of playing.
You also get flavor text for the resolution of the scenario in the case of victory or failure with pictures of the characters who are speaking to increase immersion. In Blood Throne, you do not replay scenarios, each is do or die! You fail forward but if you lose enough missions you lose the campaign and must start over. This scenario shown specifically is all or nothing (it is scenario 2 so starting over is no biggie) but after Scenario 2 no scenario results in automatic campaign failure. Scenarios penalize you for losing but do not cause the campaign to end as a specific consequence so do not worry about it being overly harsh.
Spoiler Alert! A bit of the very early story is revealed here for those that do not want that to be spoiled for them.
So we are coming down the homestretch with the Core Box components! Again, sorry for the delays but the quality I believe is really going to make people happy.
Thanks to Everyone that Visited us at LVO! The LVO, or Las Vegas Open is our big annual convention. We run events all over the USA but the LVO is by far the biggest. I was manning the Blood Throne booth and it was great to speak to so many of those of you that backed the project and those of you new to it. A huge thanks to those of you who decided to back after seeing the models and trying out the game! Forgive the poor photo quality, my phone is not fancy haha.
Below are all of the production minis and some of the prototype dice.
Below are the monsters and as you can see, some of them are HUGE!
And finally the heroes from both the Core Box and Hero Expansion, again, the production minis not prototypes. These are what come in the box preassembled! The Heroes are in light grey while the monsters are darker grey to make distinguishing them very easy.
Again we had the actual Blood Throne to sit in and take pictures!
Here’s a photo of the main hall at the LVO just for scale. This is one of 5 halls! It really is an awesome event if anyone has a chance to go in the future. My vision is to have giant Blood Throne cooperative mega dungeons and competitive tournaments.
And finally, the “Sundrop” style minis! Below are the actual production models with the paint applied. Please give me any feedback on these before we finalize the process if you have any. This is a simple and affordable way to put some color on the models which makes them look more striking and helps show off the incredible detail of the models. We can make the paint darker/higher in pigment but we felt this was a good middle ground between going more intense in the color but also being able to clearly see the detail. Once we get the final process dialed in, I can determine pricing based on the amount of labor involved.
We plan on having the monsters in red, and the heroes will be separated by Class archetype: Martial, Skill and Arcane respectively. As you always have to take 2 of each, it makes visually identifying who is what extremely easy.
Ajax here with a brown stain as all the Martial Heroes will be.
Jib Job the alchemist in green for Skill Classes.
Tatianne the Dread Mage in Blue for Arcane Classes.
The Berserker, a mini-boss Monster in red.
And finally, if anyone wants their miniatures fully painted, they can request a quote from the FLG Paint Studio based on what exactly you want in regards to paint scheme, quality level, etc. our studio painted the minis seen in the marketing material for an indication of potential quality.
Thanks for reading! We are chugging along and coming close to going into pre-production! On a totally random but potentially interesting note for some of you, as I have been working on the road so much I got these incredible handy screen extenders for my laptop on Amazon for $210 if anyone else needs a solution for more digital workspace while mobile. They pack up into a compact carrying case and fit quite easily into my travel bag along with the laptop and other electronic gadgets I travel with.
