$85K stretch goal achieved and 12 hours to go!
over 6 years ago – Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 12:41:44 AM

We didn't expect our momentum to carry over into today but you guys made it happen and we've unlocked the next stretch goal! Multiple skins, hairstyles, helmets and races(+racial traits) will be added into the game! This was a pretty popular goal among you all, so there should be some happy backers out there :) Let's take a look at the updated stretch goal chart and see what's next!

Violent Deaths is within reach, and we've just now revealed our final stretch goal at $105K which will increase the length of the game's soundtrack. Alex will already be composing a 60-minute soundtrack, and this goal will allow us all to hear even more amazing music from him :) Be sure to check out his BandCamp if you haven't yet!

The 12 hour mark is now upon us, so if you have been considering upping your pledge or adding-on, now is the time to do :)

Social Goals

I've updated the social goals graphic and we're very close to a few more targets being reached. You can head to the main page of this campaign to check it out and see how you can help!

So, this is it guys! If there's anyone you haven't yet told about the game, we encourage you to let them know! Thank you again for all of your amazing support, we'll be publishing our next update once it's all over tomorrow. See you on the other side :)

Final 24 hours! (+Guild Management pt. 2)
over 6 years ago – Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 07:58:36 PM

The final 24 hours are upon us, this is it! We’re still amazed by what transpired yesterday. We smashed two stretch goals in a matter of hours and made some serious headway into reaching the $85k goal. We’re excited to see what lies in store for the remainder! A massive thank you to all of our old, new and future backers, we could not have done this without you(quite literally)! We're getting so close to that $85k goal and even the $90k(violent deaths, woo!) is not out of the question, so let's make it happen :)

Stretch Goal Reveal

We revealed this yesterday but didn’t issue an update for it(didn’t want to spam you guys!). If we manage to reach the $100K stretch goal, we will be adding 2 extra classes into the game at launch, bringing the total up to 14. These 2 classes will be voted on by you (from our list of the 9 other classes). We chose not to add any further stretch goals beyond 100k for the time being, but if we hit 90k we’ll reveal what lies beyond!

Before heading into some more aspects of guild management, I wanted to mention add-ons one more time for those who might not have seen it(and a big thanks to those of you who chose to add-on yesterday, there was a number of you!). If any of the add-ons below entice you and you’re able to jump up, it would help a lot in achieving these last few stretch goals! The add-ons available are as follows:

• Additional Digital Game(Steam or Humble): $15 per copy
• Digital Art Book: $5
• Soundtrack by Alex Roe: $10
• Closed Beta + Private Discord Invitation: $15

Note: The Beta+Discord add-on does not include the exclusive guild flag from the $50 tier.

To add-on to your pledge, click on the 'Manage your pledge' button at the top, and then increase your pledge in the 'Pledge Amount' box. Add the price of the reward you want, and you can tell us later in a survey what you raised your pledge for (do not change the tier that you are currently pledged at).

Choices & Reputation

Alright, let's begin! The choices you make doing the course of gameplay can have various implications for the management of your guild. As mentioned before, making a choice that goes against a character’s alignment can decrease their loyalty and eventually cause them to question you or even leave the guild. But your choices also affect your guild’s Reputation.

While traveling throughout the world there will be numerous encounters where you will need to make a choice, the result of which can affect how the rest of the world sees your guild. Perhaps you helped some citizens fend off some bandits or wild animals? Such a deed would have a positive impact on your reputation within that area. However, come across an unprotected trade cart and choose to rob them blind? An action like that would not go over well with the faction of which the cart belongs.

If you continually assist a faction and make choices that benefit them, your reputation with them will increase. This can be very beneficial to your guild(such as reduced prices within their cities) and it will open up a variety of mission possibilities(like aiding them in wars through smaller tasks) once you’ve gained their trust. However the choices that please and benefit some, may anger and harm others. If your reputation with a faction falls too low, opportunities for missions from them will become few and far between, and even traveling within their borders may eventually prove risky.

Traveling & Missions

Traveling takes time, and time is money. Since your characters expect payment every month, it’s important to carefully consider your travel route and choose the right missions to accept and complete.

At the beginning of the game, everyone in your guild will travel in one caravan, with the exception of those who are injured and stashed away at a city infirmary. There is a little less planning to be done in this fashion but it’s still an important consideration. However, once you’ve gotten a grasp on things and have enough coin, you be able to purchase a guild perk that will enable you to send out multiple parties from your caravan to complete your missions. The caravan has a radius that your parties will need to stay within(further upgraded with perks), so you won’t be able to send them halfway across the world.

There can be some downsides(or risks) to doing this however. A party you send may arrive at their destination without incident(allowing you to begin the mission), but it’s also possible for an encounter to trigger on the way. Perhaps you are within the borders of an enemy faction and your party is set upon by their soldiers. Combat ensues and concludes, but not without injury, and now you will need to decide whether or not to send them back to the caravan or continue on towards the mission.

With the $65k stretch goal, the sea will now be another way to travel. Each major coastal city will have a port where you can secure passage for a cost and avoid otherwise long travel times. Not all ships will be equal. Some may be cheaper, but take a little longer to arrive, so you’ll have to decide what is right for you in the moment.

Thanks to the $70k stretch goal, with enough coin you will be able to purchase your own vessel. The ship behaves as a separate unit from your caravan, and you can order it around the map anywhere you wish. Its crew can complete various tasks for you while your guild is away, like ferrying passengers between cities, or smuggling supplies across trade routes. You can choose your captain, a crew(all with their own expertise rating) and spend money on upgrading your ship to increase its seaworthiness. And if you so desire, you can take it out to sea and stalk trading lanes, boarding and fighting on the decks of other ships and earning notoriety as pirates.

Guild Council

We’re thrilled to be including the Guild Council in the game as it was one of our favorite stretch goals. A lot of this info is stuff we already mentioned in previous updates, but there's a bit we haven't shared yet.

Guild Council members can be recruited from all over the world, but not all will be equal in ability. Each member will offer you advice and has a number of tasks that they can perform for the guild.

The Master at Arms is in charge of your warrior classes, and he or she is able to train them in the art of war and other aspects of combat. You can assign each of your characters to study a subject under them by selecting one of the existing categories available. Each category has a number of traits attached to it, and over time as the student learns, they will acquire some of these associated traits. The ability rating of your Master at Arms will play a part in how effective, and how fast they are able to teach students. In addition, you can also send your Master at Arms on journeys to various destinations to find promising new recruits. The Archmage functions in the same fashion as the former, but is instead charged with your mages.

The Emissary is your guilds chosen representative for improving your reputation with other factions. When assigned, they will slowly increase your reputation over time with the targeted faction. In addition, they will bring a variety of missions to your attention that the target requires assistance with, allowing you to further increase your reputation and get rewarded in the process. If you wish to improve relations with an enemy faction, it may be best to start by sending your Emissary, but this is not without risks(will continue on this below..).

The Master of Intrigue is your main advisor and functions as your eyes and ears throughout the world. They will bring important matters to your attention that you may otherwise never hear about(such as a plot to kill a liege) in addition to any unsubstantiated rumors that may be worth looking into. They also have the ability to disrupt relations between factions of your choosing, potentially providing the spark that leads to an all out war.

For most tasks there will be some sort of risk involved for your Council members. For example, by sending your Master at Arms to recruit warriors in a region that is hostile(either because they dislike you or because it is at war), there is a small chance he may be killed. Your Adviser has a chance to get killed while trying to uncover plots or disrupt relations between factions. Your Emissary could fail at improving relations, and instead their head gets returned to you courtesy of the faction of which they were assigned. As mentioned, positive outcomes can result in mission opportunities, but negative outcomes can too. If any of your council members are killed during a task, this has a chance to trigger a retaliatory(if you know who was responsible) or an investigative quest that you can choose to undertake.

As a bonus, and a sort of reward for managing to keep a character alive until their retirement, you will be able to offer them a position on your Council. Perhaps they had a very high Charisma rating, and you feel they would make a good Emissary? Or their martial prowess was unparalleled and they would make an excellent master at arms? Whatever the case, if their Loyalty to the guild is high enough, they will most likely accept the position.

There’s a bit more I could have covered as I wrote this up last night, but I had been running on fumes and required some much needed sleep! There are still some more content updates we want to share with you too such as ‘Overworld Encounters, Events & Simulation’ and ‘World Lore, Regions, Houses & Factions.’ The former is already mostly written up and we’ll likely get it out sometime this weekend!

A big thanks again to all of our backers and supporters. This campaign has already surpassed our best expectations and we’re so thrilled to have so many of you along for the ride; your enthusiasm for the game has been nothing short of amazing. Thank you!

Crowdfunding Shout-out

I’d like to give a quick shout-out to the folks from Ash of Gods, a very stylish looking tactical RPG. 

 

Ash of Gods is a turn-based RPG mixed with a visual novel set in a dark fantasy world and heavily inspired by The Banner Saga series. They successfully finished their Kickstarter campaign several months ago but you still have a chance to get the game, as well as all the fancy rewards by late backing on their PledgeManager portal:

https://aurumdust.pledgestage.com/projects/ash-of-gods/participate/

The developers already have a playable build of the game available, and just started closed testing of a multiplayer PvP mode for their backers. You can join them and try Ash of Gods yourself if you think it's something that's up your alley!

 

Final 48 Hours! $65k stretch goal achieved!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 12:59:15 AM

Good day everyone! Things are continuing incredibly well as we begin to countdown the final 48 hours, and once again we cannot thank you enough for all of your support! 2500 backers is a lot, and it’s hard to believe that number is real! As a result, we’re now about to hit the $65k stretch goal so it's time to reveal the $90k one! Before doing that though, there's a few things we wanted to mention first.

Firstly, we’ve just created an imgur post(here) to help with our final push. If you have an account, it would help the campaign a bunch if you could take a second to upvote and like it.

Closed Beta + Private Discord Add-On

We’ve had a couple requests to include the Closed Beta & Private Discord invites as an add-on. We thought it was a good idea, so if you’re currently part of the $15-$25 tiers, you can now add-on $15 to gain access to the Beta & Discord when they become available(the Discord should be up within a week after the campaign ends). Given the amount of backers we have in those tiers, even just a fraction of pledge increases could be the difference in reaching our stretch goals. So if you’re enticed by the add-on(or any others) and you are able to, please consider jumping up!

To add-on to your pledge, click on the 'Manage your pledge' button at the top, and then increase your pledge in the 'Pledge Amount' box. Add the price of the reward you want(listed below), and you can tell us later in a survey what you raised your pledge for (do not change the tier that you are currently pledged at).

• Additional Digital Game(Steam or Humble): $15 per copy
• Digital Art Book: $5
• Soundtrack by Alex Roe: $10
• Closed Beta + Private Discord Invitation: $15

Note: The Beta+Discord add-on does not include the exclusive guild flag from the $50 tier.

And the newest stretch goal is...

 At the moment, each character class and enemy has a single death animation. With this stretch goal each class and humanoid enemy will receive an additional violent death animation that will trigger on rare occasions. These will have some gameplay implications as well. If a character of yours is decapitated, it may traumatize a party member; while slaying an enemy in a violent fashion may spur your characters on and increase their Spirit further.

Thunderclap

As mentioned yesterday, we’re running a Thunderclap campaign to help give us a boost for the final 24 hours. If you use Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr you can opt-in for free to help us out! Thank you :)

Steam Store

Lastly, for those who are following the campaign but are undecided on whether or not you will be backing it, we’ve gone ahead and created our Steam page so you can add the game to your wishlist.

Stay tuned for part two of Guild Management which will be posted either later today or tomorrow morning. Again, thank you all so much, our team is super excited to see what these final days have in store :)

Guild Management (pt. 1)
over 6 years ago – Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 01:41:36 AM

Uhm, wow! So today’s been absolutely bonkers, well over 200 new backers which is our highest daily total yet; a massive thank you to all of you wonderful people! It’s only been 24 hours since we hit the first stretch goal, but we’re already well on our way to hitting the next. Let’s keep it going! :D

Guild Management

So far, our content updates have been focusing on classes, characters and various combat-related systems, but now it’s time to step outside of the mission phase and talk about Guild Management!

Let’s begin at the top with recruiting and managing the contracts of your guild’s roster. As you probably know by now, the game can potentially span the course of centuries, and because of this you will lose characters to death, retirement, and sometimes due to mismanagement. But fear not, there are a number of ways for you bolster your ranks and recruit new characters. The first and most common form is by visiting any of the various city hubs within the world. By visiting the tavern you will be presented with a list of available adventurers within that city. Potential recruits can vary by class, age, experience, and contract expectations(cost). As I have mentioned previously, recruits are not always raw and if you have the funds you can recruit a higher ranked character, which will help to alleviate any potential grind later in the game.

You will be able to look in-depth at each adventurer: see what traits they have, what abilities and passives they possess, what their alignment is and all about their backstory and how they came to be. Your guild’s reputation also comes into play here, as some characters may not be interested in joining up with you because of past decisions or actions you have made. You will be able to negotiate a bit and offer them a higher signing bonus or contract, but not all characters morals’ will be swayed by coin.

Another way to recruit new members is in a more organic fashion, which can happen through the completion of a mission(if you help them out, they may wish to join you), or by coming across a fellow adventurer during the course of a mission. The same rules apply here, you will be able to view all of their stats and if you think they would be a good fit, you can then negotiate a contract in order to secure their service.

The third way, and part of the first stretch goal is by using the Master at Arms and Archmage within your Guild Council. Different regions of the world are more likely to contain specific classes, so if you find yourself lacking a certain class or two, you can send your Master at Arms or Archmage to find potential recruits within the assigned region. Depending on how far they have to travel, this process can take some time. They will also be unavailable to perform other tasks for you until their return. Your Guild Council members have their own stats, and the more qualified they are at their job, the better they will become at identifying promising recruits for you.

No matter how they are recruited, all characters on your roster are signed to a contract. The duration and salary of these contracts will vary for each character, depending on what you negotiated when you first recruited them(or when their previous contract expired). When negotiating, a character’s Loyalty to the guild, their Affinity with the other members, and their experience level will all play a factor in how much they expect to be paid for their next contract. If at any point you find yourself lacking in funds you will be at risk of losing some characters to desertion. Those with a higher Loyalty will give you some leniency in this regard, but others may jump ship sooner rather than later.

Speaking of Loyalty, let’s expand on that a bit. Loyalty is the rating of a character’s happiness towards the guild as a whole. It is mostly affected by the relationship between you and that specific character, but it is also influenced by their Affinity towards other members within the guild. Characters with high Loyalty are easier to manage, and they are more likely to stick around until retirement or death. Characters with low Loyalty are less likely to stay with you for their entire career. They will voice concerns over matters such as their usage on missions, or the choices you have made thus far. If you ignore these concerns, their Loyalty will continue to slip until they eventually leave the guild. There are a number of ways to increase loyalty however, and the biggest boost is by completing a character’s “Loyalty Quest.” Based on their backstory, most characters will have a “goal” in life, and after enough time passes they will approach you and ask for your assistance in achieving it.

In tomorrow’s update we’ll continue with the rest, covering things such as choices, reputation, traveling, accepting missions and more!

Final Push

As we approach the last 48 and 24 hour marks, we could use your help in making one final push for the remaining stretch goals. On Wednesday at 12pm EST we’ll be making one last Imgur and Reddit post, and we’ll include the links with tomorrow’s update at that time. We’re also running a Thunderclap campaign(here) that will go out during our last 24 hours. If you use Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr you can sign up for free and help us out!

Thanks again to all of you for helping make our dream game come true. This has been a crazy ride and we’re glad to have you all with us!

Shout-outs

There are 2 games we would like to give a quick shout-out too. The first is Sacred Fire, a successful project on Kickstarter that is now in the midst of an InDemand campaign on Indiegogo. It’s a tactical choice-driven RPG where your success and the solutions to conflicts lies in understanding the psychology of the characters.

 

It has an intriguing and unique approach to gameplay that I’ve never seen before in an RPG, and you can give them a look on Indiegogo.

Cultist Simulator is another game that has caught our attention(and clearly many others!). It’s a narrative crafting digital card game created by Alexis Kennedy(whom you may know from Fallen London, Sunless Sea). I don’t typically play many card games but I tried out the alpha build and had quite a lot of fun with it! So if by chance you haven’t seen the game here on Kickstarter, I would recommend checking it out, especially if you’re a fan of his previous works.

First stretch goal achieved, and the next revealed!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 01:45:26 AM

What an incredible weekend it has been! Not only did we reach our funding target on Friday, but in a mere 3 days time we have also achieved the first stretch goal! Thanks to you amazing people, we are thrilled to announce that the Guild Council will be in the game on release! So what's next, you ask?

Behold the $85k stretch goal! If achieved, we will be adding multiple skins, hairstyles, helmets and races into the game for every class, allowing you to further customize your characters and make them truly distinct. Alongside multiple races is the inclusion of unique racial traits as well. This is a big task, and while $85k seems like a lot, we believe it's not out of reach! But for now, let's focus on the 'Sea Travel and Encounters' stretch goal, shall we? ;)

If you have not yet read up on what the next few stretch goals entails, you can check out this update.

Thunderclap

We are running a Thunderclap campaign to help give our campaign one final push during the last 24 hours. If you have a Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr account we would greatly appreciate it if you could take 30 seconds to support us. It's completely free and doesn't require much more than clicking a button :) Sign up here.

Again, thank you all so much for the incredible support! We are blown away by what you have accomplished in the last 4 days and we're excited to see how the rest of the campaign pans out!