• 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.

• 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!

• 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.