The Dragon Heresy Introductory Set is a fully playable game, covering character creation, adventuring, combat, gear, and challenges. In the book you will find: * Norse-inspired culture, cosmology, and mythology * Deadly and tactically interesting combat * Rules and options to bring viking-style martial combat to the Fifth Edition of the world's most popular Fantasy RPG, with both tactical and narrative tools The game and contents are geared toward exciting play in these early levels. The "Introductory Set" get the players and GM acquainted with the new axes of engagement enabled by the new mechanics, and will be supported by future releases.
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More later, but thank you all so much for helping the project hit its first stretch goal.
My goals tend to be major, and far apart. This one is no different, and the extra content survey will go out sometime today. Maybe quite quickly, since my day job computer refuses to boot up anymore.
Thanks again to all who have pledged
I got a very nice review of my first book, Dungeon Grappling, over at Steven E's video review channel Complete Nonsense. The philosophy and spirit animating the rules were the same as with Dragon Heresy: get it fun, get it fast, get it right. That came through to the reviewer, who said nice things about the book.
The next official goal is the offset print run at $16,000. That's not impossible if we get an uptick in velocity. On the other hands, as I mentioned earlier, I'm starting to get some very interesting print quotes in, with more expected this week. I'll see how things shake out, but I'm cautiously optimistic that fun things might happen at $12,000 instead of $16,000, even if not full-on offset run awesome is a bit distant.
For now, spread the word, and let's press on. That next goal is only 12 skjald-hirð pledges, 60 Styðja, or about 125 more folks if the average pledge holds. That's just not that many folks in the grand scheme of things. Spread the word, and let's make an even better book.
Thanks again!
As of right now, we are only $160 from passing the "Additional Content" Dragon Heresy Introductory Set Kickstarter stretch goal at $10,000, and the odds that we will pass that goal given a full week left seem good.
With that in mind, here are the options that will fill up the survey for "what do you want included?"
So, that's it. The survey will ask that you give me your favorite 8,000-10,000 words to include. I'll see what I can do to automate it a bit. I will start with everyone's most favorite requests and work my way down until the 16 pages are complete. Thus far the layout is in the 610-630 words per page range.
Sorry about the list as an image; there's a cut/pasteable version of it on my blog.
The Kickstarter update function is good for many things.
Formatting is NOT one of them.
So I'm going to post a prelude and explanation here, but then stick y'all with a link to my blog for the main update, which is a rules excerpt.
Access is one of the more jealously guarded privileges in hierarchical systems, and social standing reinforced status, but also kept the big dogs ideally focused on the issues they need to be concerned with. Details of policy and realm health, maurauding fae raids, and magical curses. The important stuff.
The rules below are a revision of a new insertion to the Dragon Heresy set, and seemed like a good idea when in my recent streaming play the 1st-level characters seemed bound and determined to head off to see the hajarl or a merchant prince personally. I deflected it in play by having a lower-rank NPC, who happened to be related to the merchant prince, take the call instead. Why pick up dice if you don't have to?
But some sort of guideline for whether or not an influential person will take the PCs request seemed wise.
Plus: if you're wondering, this is basically an equivalent of "you get XP for gold." The wealthier and more successful you are, the more ships, fortresses, and troops you commend, the nicer your armor, weapons, and clothing, the more you look the part of the mighty hero. It's also a good way to look at how a sheltered offspring of a powerful noble might be a 1st-level or lower character, but still be worthy of dealing with seriously: good Persuasion due to charisma and practice, plus tremendous status and resources. Suddenly not all lords have to be 15th level fighters or mages (though many will be)!
The rules here aren't final. I may flip it around a bit and instead make the Social Standing a passive check, and recast this as a 2d10 or 3d6 roll for a "reaction" with relative standing as a modifier (so it's a single, player-facing roll instead of a contest). A passive score will also allow a quick comparison: "no, you're more than 20 lower than Lord Robert; the best way to get the hajarl's ear is to approach Lady Alina, the newly-appointed jarl of one of his vassal towns; she's a jarl, but of lower standing and might treat more equally with you, and SHE can bring your petition before Robert."
None of the concepts below should replace good roleplay, but they will help guide things. I may yet flatten things out a bit; pretty much anyone could step in front of the Thing/Althing to speak, and the kind of disparity in social standing was a continental thing more than a viking thing. But the core is there, and this basic concept is easily portable into other games: apparently this works out fairly well using ACKS' native level tables as well.
So there we go. Here's the Dragon Heresy version of "XP for gold."
As the Kickstarter winds down, today I'm going to write rules for "flyting," a ritual poetic contest of insults. That will complete the "alternate rules work" that I want to do to provide options for conflict and conflict resolution that don't involve pointed sticks. Between flyting and grappling and access restrictions found below, there are plenty of ways to challenge the party without relying n always breaking out weapons.
From here, I will get busy with writing "Identify Fiend or Foe" advice for my monsters, and ensuring that some of the "I'll do this later" parts of the ms are finally complete.
Greetings, fellow Torengur! We're entering the third weekend of the project, and things look pretty good.
We had a great day yesterday, driven largely by another stalwart joining the ranks of the Skjald-hirð. He's asked for a sweet, sweet paint job on his shield, too. Dark blue background, with a gold torc, one boar-head, one deer-head, holding the Ingwaz rune between them. All of these symbolize Freyr, who is Yngwi Lifegiver in Dragon Heresy.
This is a personal shield project I just finished, and except the boss (which I used because I had it; it's too heavy and too large by far), is a good example of what the shields will look like. The heads here are dragon heads.
The ansuz-rune is the rune of the Asfolk martial arts school at which I'm learning viking-style fighting. You can see the school and me throwing an axe here in the designer's notes video.
In the background things are moving in terms of production. I got the first edits from Vince in the mail yesterday, looked them over, and found them worthy. He's tightening up my language and poking at holes in the thought process.
The entire pre-production team: layout, editing, and indexing, is now being brought in on the communications so we can parallel process the assembly and finalization of the book.
That being said, there are things yet to do, by me, from a writing perspective.
I've got a neat idea for a way to differentiate between combat prowess and reputation and status. Think of it as an alternate take on "gold for XP" from the old-school days.
I am determined to write and add a small section on flyting - a poetic ritual exchange of insults common in viking lore and culture that provides another avenue to victory other than murder-hoboism. Between fisticuffs, weapons, grappling, and flyting, there are many options for dispute and challenge resolution in Dragon Heresy, which is outstanding.
Finally, I'm going through the monster section and adding "Identify Fiend or Foe" blocks, where the GM will be provided suggestions for tactically useful elements that can be known about monsters and other foes based on background and skill level.
All of this will be worked into the book, and much of it is already budgeted in terms of space and layout, so that won't change the basic 256-page book size.
As of me typing this, the campaign is just shy of $700 off the $10,000 "more content" stretch goal. If we pass it, I'll send out a survey to backers with some options of what I can include, which will push the size of the book upward a bit.
I'm not quite ready to formally re-arrange my published stretch goals yet . . . but some quotes came in from printers that were very compelling. Very.
This has led me to look at options for standard and deluxe printing for the Jarl and Styðja tiers that may take a few more days to lock down.
I'll tell you this, though: the numbers $12,000 and $16,000 are very significant. There's another point at about $14,500 that's significant to me as a publisher but not so much to y'all as backers.
I'm iterating with a few different folks on super-cool things to add for your pledge to the $100 tier. Faux-leather covers, or custom slip-cover, or just a deluxe printing with a dust jacket are all being considered. No decisions yet, and being that it's bearing down hard on quitting time in the EU (all of the super-aggressive bids are from either the UK or Latvia) on a Friday, I might not be able to confirm much before early next week.
But I'm looking for ways to make both the Jarl and Styðja levels more appealing. Skjald-hirð backers will get anything the Styðja level gets, of course!
This it is, and we're into single digits. Now it's in the hands of the Norns.
We're tracking to around $14,000 if things keep on as they've been and we hit an uptick the last few days, which is typical. I still hope we can see enough acceleration to hit that offset print goal - I won't lie to you: I dream of holding that book as specified in my hands!
For now, have a great weekend, and may all your raids be profitable!