Updates from the Forge 28: August 2018

[Jubal]

Issue 28: August 2018

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Updates from the Forge issue 28! The imaginary llama is in a sulk this month, so your writing and editorial team once again consists of a trireme, a pangolin, and Jubal, who may or may not be all the same thing.

This month, your very own newsletter of creative geekery has a nicely balanced range of things from across the site to be talking about - two standalone games, one game mod, one tabletop RPG item and one webcomic - so there's something for everyone in here. In the hot summer months (especially in central Europe, where the aforementioned newsletter writer has been at times literally hiding underground from the heat) there's not been a lot of news outside the regular updates to report, though some staffing changes have taken place. The Exilian Chain Writing project has been going well and we hope to share the results of that, including the work of twenty or so fantastic writers, with you in September. We've had some good articles too, and we hope you're keeping up with those; remember to subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new articles are out.

There's been plenty of work going on across the site on many projects of creative geekery as ever, of course, and we're very excited to share some of that with you!

CONTENTS:

• Introducing Darkwatch
• A Pixel Dungeon Adventure!
• Crowds gather to watch a Tourney
• Rome: Total War gets enhanced again
• Terminus Cyberstar

Introducing Darkwatch

Purveyors of Savage Worlds gaming supplements, Utherwald Press' regular blogposts are a great source of inspiration and ideas for dieselpunk and other semi-modern fantasy settings. In their latest blogpost, they're taking a dive a little further back into the past, to introduce a new setting idea: Darkwatch!

Darkwatch will focus on a city that has been reclaimed from the forces of darkness... mostly. Or maybe only partly. Your band of heroes (heroic on a good day, anyway) will have to assist the city's new occupiers in trying to cleanse parts of the city of the remaining evildoers, as well as keeping law and order, fighting thieves in the streets or bandits in the surrounding countryside. Huge subterranean caverns and tunnels wind beneath the city surface, and it is these lower depths where many of the truly vicious of the city's former inhabitants might still be lurking, waiting for their chance to return to the surface. Darkwatch thus forms a rare idea, a reverse resistance campaign - rather than the heroes being those resisting the invaders, in Darkwatch you must try and wip out the remaining pockets of resistance to the lawful re-occupation of the city. If you can find them in the dark, that is! With inspiration from a mix of horror, clockpunk, and fantasy settings, Darkwatch will be very well worth keeping an eye on as it develops.

Of course there've been many other regular updates from Utherwald recently as well, including a wreck generator for the sci-fi setting Forsaken Space, which follows crews that try and salvage equipment from the lost hulks of dead spaceships, more updates on the Cold War Skirmishes setting, and the continued writeups of Stormwell's campaign of Frozen Skies, Utherwald Press' flagship RPG sourcebook which plunges players into a dieselpunk world on the frontiers of the icy far north!

Darkwatch Blogpost

Utherwald Press Forum

A Pixel Dungeon Adventure!

Exilian's love of creative geekery goes beyond games themselves, of course, and pixeldungeonadventure has brought his eponymous webcomic to Exilian! Pixel Dungeon Adventure follows the roaming of some Definitely Heroic Hero Types around a dungeon, in which they will battle goblins, cast spells, hopefully not kill all of the people they're trying to rescue, and most importantly find lots of treasure! Sir Bob the axe-wielding knight, Lady Val the minmaxed and calculating wizard, and Auto the... giant metal golem rogue... are heading on into the darkness, and it's time for you to tag along with them and follow their adventures.

To The Dungeon (And Maybe Treasure!)

Crowds gather to watch a Tourney

Tusky's excellent Tourney, the medieval tournament simulator, has seen several new updates this month. The game will allow you to create arenas and set up jousts between mighty and brave knights, in a range of settings, from Arthur's mythical Avalon to the underwater haven of Atlantis and eventually Gulansharo, the City of Flowers. Featuring bright, sharp vintage-style graphics, and all the heraldry and panoply one could ask for, it's shaping up to look fantastic.

Caption Goes Here

Recent updates have included work on the stands (pictured) where peasants will cluster to watch over your knockout tournaments and see the knights perform!  At other times they'll be found grabbing a beer, visiting the apothecary, wandering around the buildings and mills, and of course just standing and having a chat. Of course the core of the game will be the jousts themselves, with knockout (in some cases literally) tournaments to determine who is the greatest jouster in the land. Saddle up and head over to Tusky's thread to find out what else is planned:

Find out about the latest jousts here!

Rome: Total War gets enhanced again

Exilian's birth was rooted in the world of Rome: Total War modding, and believe it or not we're still getting on with it over a decade later! ahowl11 has created a great new vanilla enhancement mod, keeping the feel and features of the old Rome: Total War you know and love whilst also adding a number of enhancements and improvements. This includes improved battle formations and AI, the removal of a few of the more bizarre units (no, Arcani, Roman Ninjas were not a thing), improved battle AI, and better animations for a wide range of units.

Somewhere in the middle of the phalanx, Maikandros realised that he had left the oven on.

ahowl's mod incorporates the Ptolemaic Empire, a full revamp of Egypt that turns it from the anachronistic New Kingdom faction portrayed in vanilla RTW to the contemporary land of the Ptolemies, complete with typical Greek phalangites (shown above) and the other trappings of a diadochi army. With this major improvement (including the Battle of Raphia being changed to accommodate the new units), and several map tweaks made with more on the way, there's a lot to look forward to from this mod. We look forward to seeing more!

Get the mod here

Terminus Cyberstar

An RPG/FPS hybrid game from Silverspook in production, recently covered in one of his great dev update videos - Terminus Cyberstar is set in the same world as Terminus Machina, Silverspook's old Deus Ex mod which offered a wealth of features from biometric scanning and DNA editing to hacking wireless systems and a huge craft system to the real risk and threat of drone strikes. The new game will be a standalone game set in the same universe and continuity, offering a similarly wide-ranging set of options both in and out of combat as you live in a corporate-dominated world with the omnipresent threat of invasive technology and desperately limited resources. The bleak but compelling cyberpunk futures explored in Silverspook's work are always intriguing to discover more about, and with the recent addition of a level designer to the team it seems like we'll hopefully be getting to hear more about Terminus Cyberstar in the near future!

Find out more

And with that, dear friends, it seems that another month, and another round of Updates from the Forge, must sadly come to a close. Never fear, though, for Updates from the Forge will return, when it is called upon and needed most... stay tuned, let us know what you think, and we'll see you in September for issue 29!