Updates from the Forge 47: Autumn 2022

[Jubal]

Issue 47: Autumn 2022

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue 47 of Updates from the Forge, Exilian's newsletter of creative geekery! As ever, in this space we'll be going over the brilliant, quirky and curious projects our members have been up to, showcasing new games, creative writing, and music, and useful background projects that might provide resources for your creative endeavours. Creativity doesn't happen best in a vacuum, and Updates is a core part of how we tell the world about the great things Exilian folk have been doing - we hope you enjoy them, and if you did so, please do share the link to this issue so more people can see this lovely range of indie and hobbyist creative projects.

The summer months have been good on Exilian considering the difficulties we and many members have been facing: our monthly online meetups continue to go well, and if you're reading this we'd love to see you at one sometime (let us know if you're not recieving invitations and would like to). We've had one big and very exciting release, that of Roadwarden from our friend Aure: the game has been very highly praised for its storytelling and depth, and if you're a fan of text-focused, narratively driven adventuring then it's very well worth taking a look at. We also have a new article in the Exilian Articles section, from Jubal on the subject of fantasy and the far right, and how drawing more and quirkier inspiration from the unexpected realities of the medieval world can make it harder to produce simplified, extremist imagined pasts in our games and literature.

And then, of course, there have been a wide range of creative endeavours throughout the site. We're delighted to share with you another eight Updates from the Forge this season - read on and discover new games and ideas you might never have known about before!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial
  
• Game Development
  
  • Primordial Legends - Hollow Hero Kickstarter
  • ROCKPOOL: An RPG of the Shoreline
  • A Hero's Rest
  • Tabletop Turn Order in Rbuxton's Devlogs
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Music To Mug Adventurers To?
  • Stories from Spritelady
• Miscellany
  
  • Miraduel's Composing
  • Bluezone Sound Effects

GAME DEV

Primordial Legends - Hollow Hero Kickstarter

A new game from Melbourne based development team Toybox Games, Primordial Legends is the tale of Brunt, a mighty wombat who must set out from her home, the eponymous Hollow, to explore a jungle landscape that's full of secrets and mysteries. Raised by raccoon-folk called the Dreg, a day comes when unusually large insects disrupt the Dreg village and Brunt sets out on her journey, narrated by her adoptive father Eldar. The game unfolds as a mix of action-RPG and puzzle mechanics - here's the trailer:

There are lots of reasons for interest. From a gameplay perspective, the choice to make an action-RPG hero a heavy, high-strength character rather than a very dodge-and-roll focused protagonist happens less often than one might think, and the integration of puzzles into the gameplay should provide varied gameplay and interest. The game sections shown in some of the images and trailers look very pretty - dense jungle environments give a lot of opportunities for backgrounds feeling lush without trying to render things on into eternity - and the inclusion of a full voice cast suggests a very character-driven focus to the story. The bits we know of the story so far provide a general sense of mystery and adventure, and add to the genre of wombat heroine characters in fiction probably previously only represented by Ursula Vernon's Digger which has a lot to recommend it as a course of action.

Also, it's on kickstarter! There's only a few days left of the campaign so do head over and have a look at it now if you think this game might be of interest:

Check out the Kickstarter

Discuss the game on Exilian

ROCKPOOL: An RPG of the Shoreline

From our own Jubal, a new RPG book! ROCKPOOL, as the title implies, gives you the chance to play strange little fey creatures who may or may not implicitly be similar to hermit crabs, living around the edges of a rockpool. The 12-page book includes rules for playing the game, from giving your characters aims and balancing their stats to key specific mechanics for the tide and for dangers and occurrences around the rockpool world. The game's three stats work as trade-offs between different capabilities, so there may be dangers in min-maxing too much through the game. Also included is a bestiary with everything from dog whelks to driftwood hags and starfish to shoreline crabs, giving you a range of different creatures to interact with in your adventures.

ROCKPOOL is solely and exclusively available so far as part of the Katelynn's Closet Charity Bundle, which is available now on itch.io and offers you the chance to get over forty different tabletop RPG products being sold together for charity. The bundle already reached a match-funding offer of $1000 but is still running so every purchase will add to the 2000 dollars already raised to help disadvantaged young people in the Cape Cod area get clothes and supplies they need. The bundle also includes a tiny action RPG about peas, journalling games about mail delivery and strange pets, and much more besides! Why not take a look?

Discuss ROCKPOOL on Exilian

Get the Katelynn's Closet Bundle

A Hero's Rest

Building up a tavern in 'A Hero's Rest'

From Vanargand Games comes a new management sim game about setting up a stop for bold adventurers - producing a tavern, blacksmith, apothecary, and the many other amenities heroes might need, while providing them with suitable quests and goods. You must manage your buildings in considerable detail, including furnishing, ordering food and creating quests, items and equipment to sell. You can also produce templates for different kinds of adventurers who will boldly go forth to gather supplies or clear out goblins for you - but beware. Managing your resources may be tough and require you to find extra resource around the landscape or barter with passing traders, and heroes may well retire or go elsewhere, or even die, if you don't get them the supplies they need.

The game goes into Early Access on October 12, and it can already be played in demo version on Steam. The demo lets you work through a few weeks at the start of the game and takes you through a tutorial of the basics. The systems feel high-detail at first but once buildings are set up it's quite possible to settle into a general rhythm of working out where the gaps in your storage or sellable items are and trying to work out quests and actions to restock and progress through the game. The cartoonish-fantasy look and feel is pretty fun to watch as patrons and paladins come and go, and the game seems to offer a really wide array of options, so if management sims are your thing, this may well be worth checking out.

A Hero's Rest on Exilian

Check out the game on Steam

Tabletop Turn Order in Rbuxton's Devlogs

“What were they originally based on?”

“A random-ish pattern from a playtest with Fox and Stuart.”

“But you made them average to a fixed value, right?”

“Yes, but I can’t remember the average. That changed too.”

At this point Dennis, the Maths teacher, returned to his cereal, shaking his head.

One of Rbuxton's recent dev logs takes a deep dive into developing particular mechanics for turn order in a tabletop game. The tension between wanting to have a fluid, unpredictable turn structure in gameplay to force strategic problems and on the other hand the difficulty of executing actions simultaneously in a tabletop system is a long standing problem. Dice rolls, dealing cards, working out action systems that can be nominally simultaneous, using action point scores, and many other mechanics have been used in attempts to deal with it, and many games need slightly different ideal solutions to this problem. Richard's devlog gives a great insight into what grappling with these sorts of design issues can mean when pulling a game together, and how playtests and revisions can build as a process towards new solutions to the problem. If you're a designer or thinking about doing some mechanics design for board or indeed computer games, this may well be worth a read to help think about possible processes for getting through these sorts of problems...

Read the Devlog

Richard's Exilian Thread

ARTS AND WRITING

Music To Mug Adventurers To?

Jubal has recently been working on some more fan-music, and has released A Mugging Song, a short ditty about the Two Muggers, a pair of characters from Viva La Dirt League's Epic NPC Man skits. Accompanied by carefully cut clips from the original comedy sketches, the song merges folk, filk, and English light music styles to give. It's just one of a range of fandom and comedy songs that Jubal has done, too: there's also There Once Was A Fisherman, based on the VLDL film Baelin's Route, as well as a range of Dragon Age original songs (Lay of the Dread Nuggon, Harding's Waltz, and more) and Tolkien and Game of Thrones originals too. Why not check them out?

Exilian Media on YouTube

Stories from Spritelady

Lost in thought, Aurora gazed at the deer for several long minutes. Eventually, a particularly savage twist from the deer broke her from her wandering thoughts and she heaved a sigh. She couldn’t risk it getting free and hurting her, or rampaging on to the village, and it was clearly suffering. That meant she had to remove the risk, however much it went against her instincts.

Flicking her wrist, a thorned vine lashed from her hand and struck the beast in the chest. It stilled. In the quiet that followed, all Aurora could hear was the slow, steady drip of the blue taint as it fell to the ground.

As Aurora headed deeper into the woods, she began to notice ever more frequent signs of the infection. Before long, almost every tree and plant she passed seemed to contain traces of the blue canker. In some places, thick vines the size of her arm were wound around the larger trees, somehow seeming violent and threatening, despite the stillness of her surroundings...

From Exilian's own Spritelady we have another fantasy tale, this time of an elf called Aurora, following a mysterious illness through the woods. Caught between her desire to help heal the wounded and her need to help her party track down the source of the disease, she faces infected beasts that are spreading the blue-tinged sickness through the forests. But are Aurora and her companions themselves even safe?

Find out more by reading Spritelady's writing thread! We love seeing new writing and ideas on the writing areas of the forum, so if you want friendly and helpful feedback and thoughts on any of your work, please do feel free to share it on there as well.

Read Aurora's Tale

Visit Exilian's Writing Section

MISCELLANY

Miraduel's Composing

One of Miraduel's pieces for upcoming game 'The Little Green Mage'.

Hugh Holbech aka Miraduel posted in our Skills and Resources Offered section to showcase his composing work, offering highly competitive rates for videogame compositions. His recent work has included tracks for the games The Little Green Mage and Mad Chess, and his website includes a free music pack for game use that comes along with a sign-up to his email newsletter. There are some great themes and a range of classic thematic instrument sounds in his available work, so if you're an indie game studio or perhaps a small film-maker wanting more affordable professional work, Miraduel may well be the place to go.

Exilian Thread

Miraduel Website

Bluezone Sound Effects

From music and sound developer Bluezone Corporation, danys87 has been posting a range of low-cost WAV format sound effects for purchase and use in a range of projects. These include a stone textures pack with over seventy different stone impacts and similar, and a SF/Steampunk weapon pack with over 100 effects for the firing of everything from rifles to grenade launchers to futuristic lasers. The Bluezone website also includes an array of free sample packs for use in your projects, including a 1GB pack of sci-fi ambiences and SFX which could have a hugely versatile array of uses for futuristic settings. As such, there's a lot of potential utility pieces for your projects, and it may well be worth taking a look:

Bluezone Exilian Thread

Bluezone Website

And that's your lot for Autumn 2022! We hope to have many more exciting projects and updates to share with you for our Christmas/New Year issue at the very end of 2022, now just three months away. Maybe one of them will be yours? We'd love to have your creativity in this space too. Either way, we hope you enjoyed Updates from the Forge - please do leave a comment to let us know your thoughts below. Until next time!