* Kickstarter ends, and we are fully funded!

A few minutes ago the Kickstarter for the new edition of the game ended its funding period, and not only did the game become fully funded, not only did we get to the first stretchgoal, unlocking Circles Disrupted as a reward for all relevant tiers of pledges, but we also got within a hand’s breadth of the second stretchgoal, so as a bonus we are also giving the Same Old Story adventure as a stretchgoal for those same tiers.

This does not end the work with this edition. It begins the work.
Now we will make sure that the game is ready for fulfillment, getting another proof from the printer (as the first one had some errors that needed to be fixed) and then sending out all the rewards. Then we will move on towards the next part of the game, and its first expansion; The World That Is.

Thank you to all who participated in the Kickstarter campaign, making it possible to reach its goal, and we all look forward to getting the game into your hands.

* Q&A about the game at Randomworlds

I attended a Q&A session regarding the latest version of the game at Randomworlds. It was a lot of fun and we covered topics such as the basic rules, questions about monsters, how magic works in the game, artwork, and combat. You can read it all here.

* Kickstarter is now LIVE!

It is time to start the new year with a journey onto the Lost Roads of Lociam!

You can click on the link below to be taken to the project, learn what we are trying to accomplish, and join in the fun!

* Lost Roads of Lociam coming to Kickstarter!

Happy Holidays everyone!

It might have been a while since you saw any updates here, but we have been far from idle!

The Lost Roads of Lociam was published in 2010, and once the edition was completed, it went into a sort of hiatus. Well, that hiatus is now over, and we are proud to introduce Lost Roads of Lociam – Age of the Black Chaimara!

This new edition of the game, set 75 years after the last edition, has a completely reworked rule-system, from the ground up, and returns to the world of Lociam now rife with turmoil following the re-emergence of the ancient pantheon of the Black Chaimara.

What adventures wait ahead? Let’s find out together!

We have decided to make this into a Kickstarter, just to see what that is like, and we hope you will join us there. The link below will get you to the notification-page, and as soon as the project launches you will be notified! We hope to get into the thick of things in early January.

We look forward to seeing you all there!

• 4th draft is done – let’s get printing!

At long last I have gone through all of the 4th draft of the game, and after getting a new desktop layouting program (Affinity Publisher), I have done a complete re-work of all the layouting, including character sheets, and gotten a lot more art lined up.

I think we are nearing completion of the first batch of books.

Next on the to-do is to check out costs for printing and shipping, so that I can do some math regarding Kickstarter.

• 3rd draft is done

As we work tirelessly on the next edition of the game we are editing the layout, printing it, proofreading the draft, then re-editing it to improve it. The first draft was completed just 18 months ago, and we are now on draft 3, and not only is the main rulebook complete, but the character creation rules as well! Currently, editing is progressing on one of the adventures “Lights In Old Houses“, and once that’s done I think we are just about ready to finalize and try to get this thing into your hands!

• Sometimes you get to fix mistakes

I am, as you may know, editing the latest edition of the game.
And I am using a machine to help me (I also have a duck, if any of you get that reference).
One of the things I am looking at is if the professional trainings are equal. I mean, do you get a raw deal for being trained as a craftsman as compared to a magician, from a points-perspective. As the chance to get all the professions is the same, it makes sense that they should be “worth” the same, right?
It is important to not overpower certain groups of characters. So I ran the numbers, and it came out like this.

Worst professional training?
Warrior – absolute wreck. Just shy of 30% of the training the higher tier professions get.
Pathfinder, Leader, Demonhunter – pretty dismal. Just about 50% of the training that the better ones get.

The winners?
Magician comes out at the same level as Priest/Priestess, at twice the Pathfinder, Leader and Demonhunter.
Healer – slightly ahead of the magician.
Top of the totempole? Craftsman. Soooo many points.

Now warriors get +10 Athletics, +20 Martial and a free Proficiency in a weapon/armor. Instead of just +5 Athletics and +15 Martial.
And demon-hunters jump from +10 Perception, +5 Martial and +5 Magic to a far more respectable +20 Perception, +10 Martial and +10 Magic.

Instead of a spread between 14 points of “gains” to 35, the spread is now 32-34. Far fairer all around.

That took me the better part of an evening to sort out, but at least now it is done, and I think the professions are all the better for it.

• Working in the background

Even though you may not have been able to see it, the game has actually been progressing. These things happen in the background when you aren’t looking. I just did not feel it needed an update until there was some substantial progress to be reported.

This happens to me as well, when I feel nothing much is happening, and then, suddenly, a result is produced without me knowing there was a problem to begin with. A few weeks ago this happened as I was biking off to the woods to do some hiking, and as I took a corner, all of a sudden, a brand new way to handle weapon proficiencies in the game presented itself. I didn’t know that there was something wrong with the current system for proficiencies, but apparently there was, as this system was a lot more elegant, and works a lot better. All it required was a rewrite.

In other news, the acquisition of a new piece of software solved one of the core issues that was plaguing the layouting process, and with that problem out of the way, all of a sudden, layouting the game became a dawdle. So I knocked out a first draft and this is currently being reviewed and revised. The previous layouting-process had been very costly., time-wise, and not very efficient. It had taken me about four days per chapter, and the results were not always what I wanted them to be. With this new software I was able to exceed my previous year’s worth of output in just a week.

Below is a short clip of what the rough layouting draft looks like.

The reason the clip almost comes to a stop of at the picture of the person hiding in a bush, a picture which was in the last version of the game as well, is that that particular picture was corrupted, and could not be loaded at all. I thought I had lost it, but it happened to be one of the pictures that had been sent to me physically, so I was able to re-scan and re-edit it, so that it could be included. It would have been a sad loss had it been gone forever.

The playtesters have also been busy, and completed two run-throughs of all the available pre-written adventures, and more. They have been sniffing at the rules for the first expansion as well, trying out some of the things that won’t be in the core rulebook.

The progress by the illustrators have been amazing thus far as well. Only a handful of pictures remain to fill out the rulebook and the character creation book. Then we can roll on into the adventures as well. I have been astonished by the outpour of talents on display for this little project, and the amount of effort these truly gifted individuals have displayed in their contributions. I could not thank them enough, no matter how hard I might try.

• FreeRPGday!

Lost Roads of Lociam participated in the Sci-Fi Bookstore (Stockholm) as it hosted FreeRPGDay on the 15th of June.
A total of 13 heroes were made, epic destinies forged, as it were, and a lot of fun was had.
You can read more about FreeRPGDay here.

Our humble thanks go out to all who participated and made this a fun experience!

• The indispensability of playtesters

I am always greatly humbled by the ingenuity of my playtesters, and know that I would be lost without them. They have a way of finding issues and problems I could never have dreamt up on my own, and find opportunities I could easily have let slip passed me.

I am currently running several groups of playtesters to walk through the adventures that are currently written for ht 15^th edition of the game, the core game system and character creation-system.

Recently one such group arrived in a town, and found themselves in need of horses to reach some time-critical destination. The adventure they are playtesting contains, apart from the adventure itself, rules for horses, and I was all too happy to pull these out and offer the players options as to which horse they would like to purchase, and the pros and cons of each.

Several of the players were also concerned about the possibility that once they reached their destination they would be riding into fire, as it were, and were interested in how being on horseback would influence their ability to fight, if such a situation would occur.

Now, rules for mounted combat have been in the works for a long time, but I always planned on “saving them” for a later adventure, possibly making them more of a central theme, but of course that was shortsighted of me, as there was clearly a need for them, and not just a need for them, but the perfect opportunity to include them, along with the rules for the different kinds of horses.

So here we are, with tested rules for mounted combat included about four adventures “too early”, all because my playtesters correctly identified the need for them.

This is why playtesters are clearly indispensable.