• Cursed with some slight inspiration

Posted: May 12th, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: | Comments Off on • Cursed with some slight inspiration

Sometimes there are no ideas, and sometimes there are.
And sometimes, just sometimes, there are more ideas than there is space and time to actually complete.

Right now the game is in the latter of these two, and I will have to slow down in producing material so that I can catch up on the layouting of the game, the playtesting and refining, and hopefully make my way towards printing this, the 15th edition of the game.

Currently, the 15th edition has a rulebook, which is complete, and a set of character creation rules, along with a set of adventures

  • Lights in Old houses – this old gem has seen a facelift into the new edition.
  • Circles disrupted – dive into the nightmares and politics of magical circles
  • When two tribes go to war – be part of the powerstruggle and plight of tribes
  • Same old story – isn’t it always the case; heroes always get asked to be heroes?
  • In Glorious ashes – written for a themed convention, this post-apocalyptic setting has seen a rework.
  • Through the eyes of madness – another themed product, this adventure crosses the Lost Roads of Lociam with the Cthulhu Mythos.

Then there is the very first expansion; The World that Is. Apart from containing a whole lot of information on the world of humans of the Second People, rules for plants, herbs, potions and alchemy, this also contains new higher magic Spheres and some new monsters.

  • The Making of a Church – church politics on a whole new level
  • To vie for a throne – the struggles for the throne are all too real
  • God is on our side – when army faces army, the favour of the gods will tip the scales.
  • The Blackened gate – where is the 9th company? What is behind the blackened gate?
  • Matters of the heart – delve into the mysteries of the long-lost past of Lociam.
  • Passing of the torch – knights clash in this tournament with more than honour on the line.
  • Dread sails – pirates and the hunt for clues ranges up and down the coast.
  • Losing sight – can some treasures be too costly to be worth digging up?
  • Glare and thirst – just a slight blurb in the last edition, the sun now shines brightly on this adventure.

As things stand right now I will revisit the character creation and then start layouting, before returning to actually producing more material. Things need some order, or the struggle against Chaos will have been lost.

Thank you for coming along on this journey!


• A lost crown, and consistency in design of a game

Posted: October 7th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: News | Comments Off on • A lost crown, and consistency in design of a game

This thought all began with a royal crown, now long gone from the head of the monarch it was made for, and instead lost to some horrid cult.

I was re-working the adventure “Through the Eyes of Madness” for a Spooky October-session of playtesting when I came across the mention of the Seafarer’s Crown. This is an item the characters can find in the game, and it has rules for its magical effects. This is where my rabbit-hole opened.

The rules for magical artifacts were decent in the last iteration of the rules, but did not survive the transition into the current edition, so I needed to come up with a way to implement the magical artifacts into the 15th edition.

The Wavestone Regalia. By Peter Edgar

Rather than just coming up with a way to wing it and get on with writing the adventure, this actually ground the entire effort to a halt, and I had to revisit the original article where the Seafarer Crown was introduced; a specially-written article for the Swedish gaming magazine Fenix.

The crown was part of the Wavestone Regalia, a series of adventure-hooks meant to start characters off on a series of quests to gather the entire collection of the lost regalia, but also serve as a little spice of other adventures, as the regalia was scattered through a handful of adventures and locations mentioned in other adventures still. It was a fun article, but the rules in it are now of course outdated.

After reworking the article it became apparent that I needed a new set of rules for magical artifacts for this version of the rules. This was planned for the second expansion of the game, and that is most likely where it will be published, but I still needed the rules working and working consistently so that I didn’t make mistakes when adding magical artifacts to the game as I progress towards that point.

So I sat down and rewrote the Sphere of Artifacts, to harmonize it with the ways the current edition of the rules work. I had to whittle 20 effects of the original rules down to a most concise 9, had to make the rules work without secondary attributes like the old edition relied on, and so on.

And of course, when that was done I had to get the other big piece of artifact-rule out of the way; the way to randomly generate magical artifacts, which was part of the post-apocalyptic adventure “In Glorious Ashes” which was written for a Lin Con-convention some years back. That task wasn’t very easy either, as contained not just those rules, but an entire adventure-setting that needed to be re-worked into the current edition of the game. I am currently hip-deep in those broken ruins with its scavengers, bandits and monster, working my way though it. Once I am done, however, I will have a very solid foundation for balancing magical artifacts that any player can encounter in any subsequent adventure or scenario, even though the rules for making your own artifacts might not be available for some time.

 

Why is this important though? Because of consistency in game-design.

There is this game that we played a lot back in 80s and 90s. It has rules for creating your own magical weapons. You cast “Enchant weapon” at some level, and the weapon becomes that much more deadly. “Enchant weapon 1” adds 1 to the damage of the weapon, whereas “Enchant weapon 4” adds 4 to the damage. You then add permanence so that the effect does not get consumed when you use it, and then a third effect called Nexus, so that you don’t have to ‘pay’ for it with your soul’s power over and over. It is a neat and consistent system that makes it clear what you can do and how.

And then there is an adventure where the bad-guy, a sorcerer, has a sword with the description “The sword is magical and does double damage“. There is no way to cast such an effect on any item, and certainly is not an “Enchant weapon“-effect as described in the rules. This has bothered a lot of players, and bothered me when I read it, played it, and tried to figure it out.

The conclusion I came to was that if a piece of magic, skill, ability or something else should be available to the monsters and bad-guys it should, if within reason, be available in the same way, to the player characters. Why would the world make exceptions for the player characters and make it impossible for them to learn and use the same skills that others in the world could use? So when writing this adventure I have set out to try to be as consistent as possible, meaning that if a bad-guy wears armour, that armour is just as effective for him/her/it as it would be for a player character, that the sword does as much damage, that the spells work in the same way, and so on and so forth.

And this brings us back to the Seafarer Crown. I could certainly have written some rule for the crown which would have made it work in the adventure, but not be the same as the rules for similar artifacts in the next, making it pretty ad hoc, which would make it disconnected and ultimately useless. I don’t think players should have to learn new rules for the same things in each and every adventure, but expect the world to remain consistent, so that they can focus on the fun of the game instead.

That’s how a single crown lead to a re-work of mechanics for magical artifacts all across the entirety of Lociam, past, present and future.


• The Second Santa Claus-ification

Posted: September 14th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: News | Comments Off on • The Second Santa Claus-ification

Back in 1999-2000 I was playtesting the game, then in its 11th and 12th edition, with several group of players. The rules back then were very different from the 14th edition which you may know, and even more dis-similar to the 15th edition, which is in the works now. There were more abilities, more attributes, and a lot more mechanics to keep abreast of and in mind when playing. A lot of mechanics were in the form of “x number of D10 dice under a particular stat, ability or attribute”. This made it hard to remember, but allowed for a great deal of detail.

To avoid Acid Wave, roll 6D10 under CON (Constitution) or 4D10 under SPD/2 (Speed) or be dissolved by the magical acid spray.

Then there was Santa Claus. That wasn’t her real name, but everyone called her Santa Claus for reasons that have no bearing on this story. Santa Claus didn’t hold with numbers very well. Her talents were elsewhere, and she struggled trying to keep the rules and all the rules straight.

I took this on board and performed a process which was later dubbed the Santa Claus-ification. This was a rightening of the entire system into D100-format, so that all rolls were D100 against a modifier and a goal, not a nearly arbitrary number of D10 that had to be summed up.
This process also informed me in working with the 15th edition of game, building on the 14th to make it sturdier, and easier.

However, obviously the process tied a knot on itself somewhere along the line, and I have noticed some structural issues creeping in.

The roll is modified by 35, so the trait of 90 plus the roll of 41 minus 35 (90 (trait) – 41 (roll) – 35 (modification)) results in a difference of 14, which is not enough to succeed.

Somewhere in the back of my head I have felt this was the wrong way to go, and have been almost subverting these structural issues as they arise when writing adventures for the playtesting. It wasn’t until yesterday that I understood the full breadth and depth of these issues, however. Luckily the fix isn’t very difficult, only time-consuming, and I am calling this the “Second Santa Claus-ification” as it is a rightening of crooked rules, to make them more harmonious, sturdier and robust, and easier to learn and play with.

The trait is modified by -35 for this roll, resulting in a trait of 55 (90-35). The roll is 41, which results in a difference of (55-41) 14, which is not enough to succeed.

I am happy I caught these issues now so that they didn’t make it into print.

I am also happily working away at an online character sheet that does most of this math on its own. All the player has to do is put “x” where it applies, and the sheet will take care of burden, injury and magical modifiers, for instance.


• Working on the next edition

Posted: August 9th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: | Comments Off on • Working on the next edition

In 2010 I published the Lost Roads of Lociam, and over the subsequent 18 months I provided monthly new rules, errata, adventures and more through this site and others. In short, I kept working on the game.

At the end of those 18 months I was fairly confident that the system was as good as I was going to be able to make it.

And it wasn’t good enough.

 

So the new edition of the game has torn up and thrown away 98% of all the rules, and made an entirely new game-engine for itself. The story and the world is the same (although we are moving through history, so not everything is the same…) but the rules behave quite differently now. Gone are the over-complicated turn-based fights, and in are narrative structures that lets heroes be heroes. Gone are massed spelllists for the poor magic-users to memorize, and in are sleeker, slimmer rules for both magic, faith, exploration and survival.

 

Some preliminary playtesting of the system, first the character creation-system and then the adventures (which I am “porting” from the older edition into the new) has yielded positive results. Maybe, if things progress, we might see a release within a year or something.


• Nordic Gaming day

Posted: November 21st, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: News | Comments Off on • Nordic Gaming day

Nordic Game day 2016

On Saturday the 19th of November 2016 I lectured at the Nordic Game Day at the public library in Gävle, Sweden.

I had an hour at my disposal, and talked about roleplaying games in general, their history and development over the last few decades, and about Lost Roads of Locaim in particular. It was a fun time, and I got the chance to connect to some people, new and returning players in equal measure, and got to set up my little stall to sell a few books.
I am happy to have attended and look forward to seeing more of you around.
I would be happy to return, if given the chance, especially if I can get the next version of the game up and running.


• Reworking for the 15th

Posted: July 21st, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: News | No Comments »

I started making this game back in 1991 and I have been steadily improving the basic core engine of the rules ever since.
Now, with the 14th incarnation of them, I feel the rules have reached what is essentially their peak.
And they are not good enough.
So what I am doing is starting again. Not from scratch, but close enough. I am ripping up the entire rulesystem and rebuilding it from the ground up, borrowing a pipe here and tile there from the older versions, but it is a very different construction with a very different focus this time around.
Looking forward to showing it off to you guys when it is done!


Stockholm Spelkonvent 2011

Posted: September 20th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Older stuff | No Comments »

So last fall we visited the Stockholm Gaming convention and sat in what amounts to be a cold airplane-hangar which is a bit out of the way. Last year the convention was really small, but this year the attendance had picked up a bit.

This year the convention sported a Mythos-theme, and we wrote up a Mythos-inspired scenario called “Through the Eyes of Madness” which was available at the convention for the very first time. It is hard to introduce such a big and complex setting as the Mythos into the Lost Roads of Lociam with just a small adventure, and it won’t be a lasting element in the world, but as a one-off it fun.
The module ties in with an upcoming article in the Swedish gaming magazine Fenix which will be coming out in the coming weeks. The article there is on “Lost Treasures” and one of these lost treasures is located in the dark vaults of this horrible cult which is found in the adventure we sold at the convention. The other treasures are linked into other adventures, so stay tuned.

For more news as they happen in this project you can visit our -page.


Lincon 2011

Posted: June 18th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Older stuff | No Comments »

Again this year Lost Roads of Lociam travelled to the Linköping Gaming convention to be part of the fun. This year they had a post-apocalyptic theme and it inspired their entire place, the staff, everything. It was very neat.

Right in through the door of the main hall you came onto this notice-board in the form of a tire-tower, and here you could see out poster.

Ours is hte big one at the bottom, scroll down for a better picture.

For this convention we had written a special scenario, a post-apocalyptic adventure-setting called “In glorious ashes”. My sister made this wonderful poster for it too.

And in English it reads "Post-apocalyptic fantasy? Is there such a thing? Oh yes - in limited print. Specially written for Lincon."

Then there were directions to the room where we were set up. We shared the space with the great guys of Goblin Games.

Here we sold our games, handed out free stuff and talked to players and testers for a few days. Loads of fun.

The armband was part of the theme, all the organizers got them, had their signature unicorn on it, and of course, given the theme, it was wearing a gas-mask!

Fore more news as they happen in this project you can visit our -page.


GothCon XXXV

Posted: April 24th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Older stuff | No Comments »

I just came back from the 35th annual Gothenburg Gaming Convention, or GothCon as it is known.

Lost Roads of Lociam was represented at this event in the independent game-makers room, and below are a few pictures of how we were set up.

The event was a lot of fun, and thanks are owed not only to the other game-developers in the room, but also of course to the organizers and to Kenneth Hilte who was the guest of honour, who chatted briefly with everyone in the room, taking time out of what must have been a hectic weekend to get into the “indie-vibe”.

Entry into our room

The booth where we sold the game

The author displaying the buttons from all previous GothCons

We had a great time at the convention and look forward to the next one!

 

This convention also saw the launch of the Wanderer’s Compendium Volume II which will be finding its way out into distribution near you shortly. Watch this space.

Fore more news as they happen in this project you can visit our -page.


Launch

Posted: May 18th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Older stuff | Comments Off on Launch

The launch of the game Lost Roads of Lociam took place at the annual Linköping roleplaying convention the weekend of Ascension (fitting, somehow), 13-16 May 2010.merchandise
The game arrived Wednesday night but got unpacked in the morning of the 13th (Thursday). We were set up in a room of our own next to the big stores, and people passed the door looking in, bewildered, thinking there was something else going on in our room, like a three-ring circus or possibly a kiddie-pool. However, there were just us; me, and two helpers, and for three days we helped people create characters and held sessions to play the game.
creation
You got a discount if you made a character on the spot, but if it was too good then you didn’t get any discount. One should never be greedy; if you get a great character you should just pay full price.
Friday night and Saturday noon we played two games, testing out the adventure Lights in Old Houses, with six players one session and seven the other. Both groups did really well considering their knowledge going in, and that they didn’t know one another, and accomplished their tasks. Well, almost. One magician did botch a “Spontaneous Combustion” and set fire to his friend, and when he tried a “Smother fire” to put him out, he botched again, and put out all the lights in the room instead. These things happen.

Some long-gone playtesters also dropped in, honoring us with their presence and buying their own copy.

We had a great time and greatly look forward to seeing those of you who attended on the forum, and on our next event, which is being planned right now.

veteranHere the author shows off his collection of convention-badges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fore more news as they happen in this project you can visit our -page.