Updates from the Forge 19: November 2017

[Jubal]

Issue 19: November 2017

EDITORIAL

Welcome, one and all, to November's Updates from the Forge! The first snows of the winter have fallen in your humble writer/editor's city, and it definitely feels like the cold is closing in - meaning all the more time to work on or look at some of the awesome hobbyist and game development projects we've got lined up for you this time!

Not many announcements this month - the most important being that Son of the King and Lady Grey, two of our long standing and much loved staff members, have decided to step down as a result of having too many other time commitments. SOTK has held staff posts throughout Exilian's nine and a half years of existence; Lady Grey has been on staff since 2013, and the two of them married in 2015. We wish them absolutely every luck and happiness, and if you want to leave a message for them you can do so here! Exilian has also opened an account on Mastodon, a decentralised, open-source microblogging site, and we'll be carrying updates and articles to Masto much as we have been doing to Twitter and Facebook. If you're on Mastodon (or if you want to join and support a community-driven alternative to the bigger corporate social media entities), please do give us a follow at ExilianOfficial@mastodon.at!

Anyhow - onto this month's updates, which include a nice bunch of old and new. We've got more stuff from old friends like Eric Matyas and the thunderous return of the cavalry in the form of the Rome: Total Realism team, with some amazingly pretty new previews of their recent work. At the newer end, we can promise dragons, cyberpunk, hide-and-seek games, and more - there is, as always, no shortage of activity in Exilian's forges...

CONTENTS:

• Rome Total Realism Gets Real
• Meet the cast of Windy Meadow
• New free Music & Textures from SoundImage!
• Ready for Neofeud?
• Utherwald's RPG world heads south
• Bernackels' Shoggoth Is Hunting...

Rome Total Realism Gets Real

The RTR team are back with previews of the v4 Beta! The Rome: Total Realism project continue to work to provde the finest high accuracy, high detail historical reconstructions of the ancient world in the classic Rome: Total War engine, and some of the recent results are utterly spectacular:

Units previewed include the Ambacti, retainers of a celtic chieftain, and the mountain-dwelling Helveti, claimed as ancient ancestors of the Swiss of later centuries. From the Germanic tribes we also have the Bastarnae, and further east still we have units from Bactria, which mixes Hellenised and central Asian warfare styles with both masterful heave cavalry and tough pike-wielding phalangites. The team of master modders promise much more to come, and there are some amazing parts of the preview out already, so this is definitely one to watch if high-accuracy historical wargaming is your thing!

Check out the Preview

Meet the cast of Windy Meadow

No humanoids were harmed in the making of this story-adventure. Probably.

The creators of Tales from Windy Meadow have been hard at work this month, including character portrayals for all three of their main leads. You can meet Iudicia, Fabel, and Vena (left to right, in the picture), and discover their backstories, families, and motivations. Torn between lovelessness and loneliness, family and fortune, dreams and disabilities, our trio will have difficult choices to make as they work their way through the challenges of growing up and surviving in Windy Meadow's fantasy medieval world. Coming up from the Moral Anxiety Studio team will be more on the area and setting of Windy Meadow itself, so do stay tuned for that over the course of the next month!

Head for Windy Meadow

New free Music & Textures from SoundImage!

Our resident music maestro and texture treasure hunter Eric Matyas continues to pump out huge numbers of awesome textures and tracks which are free to use in all sorts of hobbyist or commercial creative projects! This month, new soundtracks include the all-new Horror/Surreal track "Bells of Weirdness", as well as looping versions of "Desert Mayhem" and "Balloon fantasy", and "Fantasy World Menu"! There've been many new textures as well, including a new page for glass textures and huge new blocks of additions for the wood and concrete sections - for all your buildings, underfoot paths, meadows, spaceships, and more, there's a massive range of useful pictures in the SoundImage library. Whatever your project, whatever your needs, do head on and discover more of what SoundImage has to offer!

Visit Eric's Music Thread

Visit Eric's Texture Thread

Visit the SoundImage Library

Ready for Neofeud?

New Exilian member Silverspook, from Hawaii, has opened a thread about his game Neofeud, a cyberpunk point and click adventure featuring a wide cast and over fifteen hours of gameplay. In this dark world, sentient robots live as an underclass, and characters may find themselves tossed as pawns into greater political battles beyond their control.

Inspired by his experiences teaching STEM subjects in Honolulu's deprived inner city neighbourhoods and growing up in, as he puts it, "a slum area of paradise", Silverspook has crafted a world with its own compelling lore - and then rendered it with his very own hand-painted cyberpunk art style to vividly bring the world to life and match the mix of politics, science philosophy, and madness promised by the game's trailer. This looks a fantastic game and its topic is well worth a visit if you want to watch the trailer and find out more...

Enter the feud!

Utherwald's RPG world heads south

The Artian Confederation: maybe better visited in the summer months?

This month, Utherwald Press have brought out several new blogposts giving ideas on the rest of their dieselpunk fantasy world to the south of Aleyska, the icebound setting for their Frozen Skies RPG books. Visiting the Commonwealth (Aleyska's major power), the battered and resentful folk of the Free State, and the disgruntled military power of the Artian Confederation, these new posts give some great additional insights In addition to these, there's of course the regular November update and a write-up of a possible scenario for GMs, entitled "Things Never Go Smooth" (a sentiment we're sure most game masters will happily sign up to!). There are always regular posts coming into the Utherwald forum, and so it's often worth checking it for more insights into what's going on in the world of Frozen Skies!

Head to the Utherwald Press forum

Bernackels' Shoggoth Is Hunting...

At least the shoggoth isn't on the roof.

And finally for this month, one new project, Bernackels' Shoggoth! This new game has small dragons in a magically powered, dimly lit hide-and-seek searching for keys. It's heavily audio-driven with keys located by their mysterious whale-like noises, and with hunter and seeker dragons making their way around the rooms, collecting coins and mysterious magical items, and using weapons, shields, and other things as they find them. This one looks well worth a closer look, especially if you like dark, gothic settings which are rendered in beautiful detail for this game - check the link below to take a closer look.

Hunt for the Exilian thread!

That's all for November - expect more fascinating projects and great updates next month, when we'll be delivering you a late Christmas bag of treats from another set of game developers, writers, artists and more. We've got big news coming up from the Empires of the Undergrowth team, as well as Exilian's staff elections coming up, Christmas itself, and the start of a new year approaching. Never a dull moment!

So, we'll see you next at the end of December - when we'll bring you the last Updates from the Forge of 2017!

[Cristina]

Are these content sources you think of yourself?