Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk
313 | Phantasy Star with Rich Lescouflair | D&D Direct Recap
Sun, 01 Sep 2024
This week, Morrus, PJ, and Jessica are joined by Rich Lescouflair to talk about Phantasy Star. In the news, lots of big D&D news including D&D Direct recap, new Forgotten Realms sourcebooks, Project Sigil details, and more! -------------------- Rich Lescouflair Skydawn Games and Phantasy Star TTRPG https://skydawngames.com/phantasystar/ Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk Ep. 112: Esper Genesis with Rich Lescouflair https://morrus.podbean.com/e/112-esper-genesis-with-rich-lescouflair/ -------------------- News [3:06] Manual of Adventurous Resources Complete https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/453064/manual-of-adventurous-resources-complete-a5e?affiliate_id=36142 [3:39] Cosmere Overtakes Avatar Legends to Become Biggest TTRPG Kickstarter Ever https://www.enworld.org/threads/cosmere-overtakes-avatar-legends-to-become-biggest-ttrpg-kickstarter-ever.706288/ [6:41] Traveller Creator Marc Miller Passes Ownership to Mongoose https://www.enworld.org/threads/traveller-creator-marc-miller-passes-ownership-to-mongoose.706368/ [10:20] Controversial designer Luke Crane announces new edition of Dungeon World after purchasing rights from Adam Koebel https://www.enworld.org/threads/dungeon-world-gets-new-owners-second-edition-planned.706370/ [13:40] Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 Trailer Released https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-legend-of-vox-machina-season-3-trailer-released.706372/ [15:38] Interrupting Interment on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/704342933/interrupted-internment-rpg [18:11] D&D Direct 2024 Watch Thread https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-d-d-direct-2024-watch-thread.706340/ [19:09] New Project Sigil Details https://www.enworld.org/threads/all-the-deets-on-project-sigil-the-d-d-3d-virtual-tabletop.706347/ [36:07] Wizards of the Coast Backtracks on D&D Beyond and Handling of 2014 Content https://www.enworld.org/threads/wizards-of-the-coast-backtracks-on-d-d-beyond-and-2014-content.706310/ [38:45] Wizards of the Coast Announces Third Party Creator Partners https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-announces-3rd-party-creator-partners.706345/ [49:30] D&D Dragon Anthology coming in 2025 https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-dragon-anthology-coming-2025.706341/ [51:40] New D&D Starter Set Coming in Fall of 2025 https://www.enworld.org/threads/heroes-of-the-borderlands.706342/ [57:56] 12 New Collectible LEGO Minifigs Coming in September https://www.enworld.org/threads/12-new-lego-collectible-d-d-minifigs-in-september.706344/ [58:47] The Strong National Museum of Play Dungeons & Dragons 50 Years of Storytelling Exhibit https://www.enworld.org/threads/new-dungeons-dragons-50th-anniversary-exhibit-at-national-museum-of-play.706404/ [59:45] Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons 50th Anniversary https://www.enworld.org/threads/secret-lair-x-dungeons-dragons-50th-anniversary.706343/ [1:01:04] Two new Forgotten Realms hardcovers coming in 2025 https://www.enworld.org/threads/forgotten-realms-player-guide.706346/ [1:09:46] Main Topic Phatasy Star TTRPG -------------------- Please support us on Patreon at http://patreon.com/morrus Don’t forget to join the Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1033145023517295/ and join us on Discord at https://discord.gg/VAuxX8M Ask your Listener Question on Twitter, email [email protected], or contact us on TikTok at TikTok -------------------- Hosts: Russ “Morrus” Morrissey, PJ Coffey, and Jessica Hancock Editing and post-production: Darryl Mott Theme Song: Steve Arnott Malach the Maleficent played by Darren Morrissey Check out all the media content from EN World at http://enliverpg.com
My name is Rich Lescaflair from Skydon Game Studios, creator of Esper Genesis and Phantasy Star Tabletop, and you're listening to Morris' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk.
This week, Morse, PJ, and Jessica are joined by Rich Lescoflair to talk about Phantasy Star. In the news, lots of big Dungeons & Dragons announcements, including the D&D Direct Recap, new Forgotten Realms sourcebooks, a Prodigal Sigil update, and more! This week on Morse's Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk!
This podcast is sponsored by Captain Wrigley's Starship Emporium. What's a starship? Is the GM mixing his genres again? Well, apparently Captain Wrigley is a very handsome man and the greatest salesman in the galaxy. Whatever that is. Wait, who's that? Greetings, Luteman. What? We come in peace. You come in peace? Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill? I'll show you shoot to kill, you witless drones.
Take this fireball right in the face! Wait, what? They were just extras for the commercial. Well, why didn't you say so? Do I still get paid?
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Morris' own official tabletop RPG talk. I am Russ, a.k.a. Morris, or Morris, a.k.a.
Russ, and with me this week is... BJ Coffey from the Southampton Guild of Roleplayers. And here, taking time out from her quest to seek bloody vengeance after those who killed a river, it's the one, it's the only, it's... It's me, Jessica from EM Publishing.
Did you say Revenge for Killing My Brother? Yeah.
Yeah.
He's still alive.
I was making a secret joke that listeners, as they listen to this podcast, will then understand.
Oh, okay.
You see, we are playing with the concept of linear time, as we agree this is flat sub. I'm just completely lost.
Okay, anyway.
I'm sorry for listening to what our guests had to say.
Well, people might be confused right now because of the way time works in a linear fashion. They have not yet listened to our interview with our guest out coming in the second half of the podcast.
The talented Richla Schofler from Skydome Entertainment, who has previously been on
but we'll talk to Rich in the second half of the show the first half of the show as usual we are going to talk about some news and there's a lot let's go it's a big big news week where shall we start what's that thing Oh, well, most of it is D&D, so let's do the non-D&D stuff first, and then we can dive into the D&D stuff. How about that?
All right, okay.
Yeah, I'd just like to start the podcast off then. Top billing, let's go. With Purple Martin Games, as done by debt signer Peter Martin, the Manual of Adventurous Resources, MORE, has reached Electrum status on DriveThruRPG. The hard way, selling all these copies one at a time. Amazing stuff. And in honour of this, he's doing 25% off.
So, you know, if you love success, now is the time to hop on that hype train. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Talking about hype trains and success. Oh, yes. Okay. Quick segue here into the biggest tabletop RPG Kickstarter ever.
Mm-hmm.
So the Cosmere, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG has finished now. Yep.
What's the score on the door?
It overtook Avatar towards the beginning of this week.
I need to know what the final numbers were, because we've got a little bit of a sweepstake on the designer forum.
52,652.
PJ, you know the question.
I'm on it, Jessica. I'm on it. Armies of the world by size.
So what country could the backers of this RPG overtake?
It's an average of $276 per backer, by the way.
52,000.
That puts us over Singapore with a mere 51,000 active military, but beneath the Dominican Republic, which has 56,000. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of people.
Good to know. Well, congratulations to them.
Yeah. So it's like nearly one and a half times what Avatar did in terms of dollars. but it's only about 60% of what Avatar did in terms of backers right yeah there's a lot less backers it's a much higher it's a more than twice as much average pledge is what's done there and a lot less merchandise as well there's a lot of stuff there's a lot of books there's a lot of books say that yeah
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is now not only the biggest tabletop RPG Kickstarter ever, it's the biggest gaming Kickstarter ever of any kind.
Is it?
Wow. Bigger than any board game or video game. Okay. But also, it's the third biggest Kickstarter ever. I believe number one. I believe by a watch. A watch? Okay. And Brandon Sanderson's own other Kickstarter, which is the number one.
Wow.
Which is his actual books. Wow. The band has a lot of fans.
Yeah. Yeah. So Brandon Sanderson has the first and third biggest crowdfunding projects ever.
Well, there you go.
It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know what to say about that other than, wow, that's a big pile of money.
Exciting time for the team that's developing the RPGs.
Mm-hmm.
like high expectations uh and good luck there well i think a lot of work ahead of them i guess yeah uh but but i bet they could probably afford some decent art yeah i would imagine so yeah anyway so what other news have we got we got some news about traveler oh yes oh yeah yeah did you want to do that one jess
Well, I'm sure I don't know any more than you, but I can certainly tell people listening. So the Traveller RPG, which people may be familiar with, it's a sci-fi setting. I don't know what to say. It's sci-fi as Traveller. You probably know about it if you're listening to this. What can I say? These were your first ever sci-fi RPGs.
1977. 1977.
I played it once. It was good. We did it in kind of a Firefly vibe-y setting and it was good fun. Anyway.
Interestingly, apparently Firefly was based on a Traveller campaign.
That makes a lot of sense because it worked. It really worked. I had a very nice session. Anyway, the news isn't that Traveller exists. We all know that's happening. So the game's creator and owner is Mark Miller. Mongoose Publishing has published the Traveller RPG materials and they've had it for years under license. And now Mark has passed ownership to Mongoose. So it's no longer under license.
They own it. So they have completely brought it out. So that means that Mongoose will continue for the future to keep publishing Traveller, I guess, because now it's not a license. So when you own something as a publisher, it's obviously a lot more secure to keep investing in it because you're not worried the license could be taken from you for whatever reason.
Yeah, yeah. I think from what I understand, Mark Miller was concerned about legacy and succession is the word he used. Sure. And obviously they've worked together for a long time and there's trust between them and obviously they trust Mongoose to take good care of his baby, as it were. So, yeah. And they didn't actually want to announce this either.
The reason they had to is because the news, the original suggestion was that Mark wanted it not to be announced until he had died. Oh, wow. Not that there's any suggestion that he's ill or anything. I don't know if he is or not.
Not that that's imminent, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Touched words, yeah. Which they were quite happy about, because they'd been talking about this for years. They signed the contracts in January of this year.
Okay.
And then the suggestion was, you know, the chances of keeping this secret for, you know, decades, or however long it is before Mark Miller passes, were slim. So they decided, okay, in that case, we'll announce it in 2027 on Traveller's 50th anniversary. But part of the process is there's a lot of third-party publishers and they had to be informed.
And because this was happening, because people were being told, people who were licensing Traveller in various ways, not just the game, but anyone who was licensing Traveller for Mark, for Mark Miller, whether they were doing art or this or whatever they were doing, had to be informed that Mongoose was taking over and they would no longer be licensing it from him, they'd be licensing it from Mongoose.
And that turns out to be quite a few people. It became really clear that the news was going to become public. There'd be just too many people knowing about it at that point. And so they decided to announce it now.
Fair enough. Yeah. Makes sense. They're ahead of the speculation and so forth.
Yeah. Traveller, massive influence on why what's all this new system. Traveller came up with, invented the life path system, character creation system, which I like immensely. Yes. And it was also famous for you're able to die during character creation.
Yeah, yes. Although nowadays... Not so much nowadays. No, no, no. Nowadays you just mainly incur crippling mental debt. Good times, good times.
Right, well, we've got some Dungeon World news.
Oh, yeah.
That's also changing ownership. vaguely know about this but not enough to actually say so it has been purchased by luke crane so luke crane you would know from burning wheel and mouse guard and was also head of community at kickstarter for some years so the game has been purchased from the original creators adam I never know how to say this last name. Kerbal, is it? Kerbal, Kerbal. K-O-E-B-E-L.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Sage Latara. Okay, yeah. And there was some accusations of sort of like poor behaviour on the parts of Adam Kerbal.
Was that not to do with a podcast where there was like Non-consensual role-playing of a sexual nature with a robot?
I believe so, yeah. I believe that's what it was.
People can imagine my face right now at this conversation.
Yeah, well, there was a little bit more controversy later, so then... Crane was currently head of community at Kickstarter, was at the time head of community at Kickstarter, and attempted a Kickstarter campaign for something called The Perfect RPG. And this is a couple of years ago, like 2020, 2021, something like that.
And one of the creators on there was Adam Kerbel, which there was a big old backlash about that. And that resulted in Crane having to resign from his job at Kickstarter.
Ah. Okay.
Right. So this is like three years later and now Crane is now purchasing the very popular Dungeon World from Kerbal and Laftora along with another business partner. I don't know who that is. And they're making a new edition of the game.
Oh, okay. Right, right, right.
I'm assuming that the original creators are not going to be involved. I've got no information either way. I'm assuming not.
For all listeners at home, there was an amazing display of synchronised shrugs coming from PJ and Jess, which should rightly have secured a place in the Olympics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Such is nature. Synchronised shrugging. Yeah, synchronised shrugging.
Synchronised shrugging, yeah. That sounds like an amazing sport. I can't wait to watch that. Could be worse, could be broken. Yeah, so that's the news, basically. Cool. That is the news.
I mean, I've not played Dungeon World a lot, so I know it's very popular and I've had a I've seen a lot of discourse about it online. So I'm intrigued to see what a new edition will bring and what changes that is.
It's Powered by the Apocalypse, isn't it? Dungeon World. Yeah. I haven't played Dungeon World, but I've played Powered by the Apocalypse, various Powered by the Apocalypse games.
Yeah.
It's a story game. Yeah. It relies on tropes.
I imagine it is a fairly serviceable job.
Yeah.
I like stories. Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what they're going to do. Are they going to move away from that system? Are they going to change the system? Are they going to keep the system? I don't know what they're doing. I don't know.
Watch this space. I'm sure they will tell us in time.
Yeah, I'm sure so. Yeah, so that's that news. Okay, what else we got? Legend of Vox Machina Season 3. Critical Role's Amazon Prime cartoon show. They've got a season 3 out now?
Animated season.
There's a trailer for season 3. It has just been released.
Yes.
Yeah.
I should probably try and look up Season 2. I think you recall enjoying Season 1, although it was a bit weird in places, I think, because they stepped out of character. Yeah. And it was a bit incoherent. But, yeah, I mean, full animation, quite enjoyable, and they had the barbarian jump out trying to hit it with a big axe.
Didn't we watch the first episode for this podcast? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm misremembering that. We did, didn't we?
I think we did, yeah. That was quite fun. Yeah.
Yeah, so season three is going to be on Prime Video on October the 3rd. There we go.
Exciting times.
Yeah, yeah. So the show kind of adapts the D&D campaign played by Critical Role. Yes. Although it makes some changes and stuff, and it takes out the sort of D&D IP stuff and replaces it with other stuff. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. Those who are fans of Critical Role should tune in.
And didn't they have, they had a kick, yeah, I just remember, yeah, they had a kick, a $10 million Kickstarter for the first season, didn't they? And then Twain picked it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that now.
But not one of the top three best crowdfunders of all time.
No, no.
Sorry, just a callback to earlier.
But probably not a million miles away from it. Yeah, yeah. $10 million isn't that much. Well, it's $14 million, I suppose. Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, so it's more than a million dollars away from it, for sure.
More than $4 million away from you.
Exactly. Okay, cool. That's happening.
Yes, that is happening. Okay. So I think that's most of the non-D&D news that I've got.
There is a lot of D&D news.
There's a lot of D&D news.
A little baby Kickstarter, which is very cute.
Oh, yes.
It's got a £455 doll, which translates to $600 US dollars. 25 days ago. It's called Interrupted Inter. You play as a dead, which I thought was quite a cool way to start off an adventure. You're creating an afterlife worth living. I just literally on Wednesday was playing Counts of Worms, which for those of you who remember the second adventure, yes, that was it. And you played as dragons.
So this idea of playing has skeletons, ghosts, zombies, vampires. Could be a good laugh.
I know which one of those I'd want to be. Ooh, is this based on skin tone or based on coolness? Well, if you're a skeleton, you've got no flesh. That's true. If you're a ghost, you can't touch anything. If you're a zombie, you're just walking around and rotting. And if you're a vampire, you just look cool and dramatic. So vampire wins every time, surely? I would argue that you suck, but...
Yeah, a skeleton, not having any skin could be a benefit. Think of how much you'll save on, like, lotion and skincare.
That's true. Well, maybe your bones will need lotion now that they're exposed to the elements.
Well, I've got arthritis anyway. They already need something, so, you know, that's fine.
Easy access. WD-40, job done. Oh, yeah, be easier. WD-40 instead, yeah.
The cure to autoimmune diseases is just get rid of your skin. Just be a skeleton. Good.
Well, thank you for that. What are you appearing in science?
Good. I fixed it.
Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's by Erin Anderson and $10 for this tool PDF copy. Yeah. It looks fun. So if you're, if you're interested, yeah, it's all there. It's all about interrupted intern.
Do you know what? That's no $10. I'll back it live.
That does actually look fun. I mean, I think I'd probably enjoy playing a one-shot of that, just playing as an undead. Yeah, that does sound fun.
I think I'll give that a go. And also, I think this, because it's 5e, I could easily port it over to a5e, because most stuff I'm running a5e now. But this looks, looking through, I could easily run it with level up. So I'll pick that up. Done. Back to live.
Hey, there you go.
All right. There we go.
Let's make it happen, people.
All right, shall we get on to this D&D news?
Yeah.
Well... You're not exciting. You're not exciting. What's the problem? I am excited. It's just that it's a lot of it.
Did a lot of this fall out of, on Tuesday, the D&D Direct?
Pretty much all did, yeah. All right.
I didn't watch that, but I know you did, Russ, so why don't you take it away?
Yeah. So on Tuesday, D&D Direct was a sort of live streamed, pre-recorded video event that went out on Tuesday evening, our time. I think it was like 10 a.m. in America. And basically it was about half an hour long and it covered three broad topics. It took a look at the upcoming 2024 core rule books. It talked about Project Sigil, the 3D virtual tabletop.
And it talked about the future of D&D in general in terms of what books are coming out in 2025 after the core rule books. So those are three things it talked about. I don't think we need to go into the core rule books yet again. I think, you know.
We've talked a lot about them.
We all know what's in them. Yeah. Yeah. We don't need that. We can just sort of go on to... What should we do first? Should we do Project Sigil or shall we do the future, the 2025 books?
Let's start with Sigil.
Do a Sigil first.
A Sigil.
A Sigil.
So what's the news with Project Sigil?
So you talked about Project Sigil for about 10 minutes. They showed a lot of very, very nice clips from it, like swooping cameras over graveyards and towns and miniature builders where you put together your digital minis and the level designer where you're adding rooms and floors and walls and traps and things like that. It all looked super, super, super slick. Way more slick than it looked.
in that demo that they did, like, was it a month ago? Whenever it was. It was at Gen Con, wasn't it? About a month ago. So it looked way more slick. I don't know whether that's because it's come along a bit further or whether that's just some selected, like, pre-rendered, you know, not actual gameplay type stuff or not. I'm not entirely sure. But it did look super slick. I will give it that.
So it's going to come with an adventure called Danger in Dunbarrow, a free adventure which you can play. And that kind of introduces the 3D tabletop to you. You can bring in, I mean, this is what you would expect anyway, but you can bring in any character from D&D Beyond.
Yeah.
But there's this mini maker. It lets you design your digital miniatures. And they showed a few quick clips of that.
Oh, nice.
Basically, you add your clothes and your hair. It's like when you make a character appearance in a video game.
Yeah.
It was like that. But it's literally a 3D miniature that you're making.
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to take a bit of a shock because I haven't seen it. But did you see anything like, I don't know, mobility aids, prosthetics?
No, I mean, it was literally just like a second. Yeah. And one shot of one mini.
Yeah, because I was thinking about it to sort of raise the point of the day. And actually, you know, we've had 20 years of casualties coming back from foreign wars in the UK and the US.
There's people... Well, this is... I don't know if it's the answer to that.
But yeah.
I couldn't say what my idea was. Fair enough.
Yeah. You can see it if they do.
Yeah. I mean, they talk about, like, stylistically, these assets, as they call them, they say they're designed to make it feel like you're buying, like, a high-end miniature. Ooh, okay.
And will you be able to buy that as a high-end miniature?
Ooh. A real one?
They didn't say. Yeah, well, things like Hero Forge exist, I'm sure.
Yeah, well, no, they haven't said anything like that.
Okay.
I don't know. I reckon if you give Hero Forge... A couple of weeks and a bite of the cherry they'll knock some. They're very innovative.
My guess is there's going to be obviously a whole load of stock miniatures. Monsters and things like that. There'll be lots and lots of those and you can buy and collect those. Almost certainly. I don't know whether you'll get any for free. You must get some for free.
They're looking very computer gamey. I know in computer games I get different skins. So I'd start off with a bunch of basic stuff and then if I want extra I have to pay for it.
Yeah, I don't know. Or maybe each adventure you buy will come with whatever miniatures it needs. I don't know. That's probably how it works. But I'm guessing that when you design a mini using this miniature generator, you can design it, but then you have to buy it once you've designed it. I would guess.
I'm intrigued to see. I'm wondering if it'll be subscription or microtransaction. The people at the top do like microtransactions. Because they've seen that work with digital games. So I think for this, they're like, well.
Well, I think they said there's going to be like a tryout sort of mode that you can try it out for free. So I assume that's going to be like a limited functionality or limited time.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Maybe being too hard on these people like Renny Casper and stuff. Because there are computer role-playing games, right?
There are.
Indeed, indeed. is demonstrably a role-playing game you can play on a computer. Like, are these not the same thing? And for the people listening to this conversation, obviously not, but I could see how you could get it confused.
Well, I mean, Jess, you were saying last week, I think it was, about how for you the sort of link between this and Baldur's Gate in experience is of interest to you.
Oh, yeah.
They mentioned that as well. Ooh, what did they say? So they basically said, you know, it's like someone who's played Baldur's Gate will come along and see this and it won't be totally unfamiliar to them. And that's kind of the idea behind it.
Yeah.
I guess it's bringing... So people who are used to video games will kind of... Yeah. Yeah. There's touchstones that they'll recognise.
Absolutely.
Yeah. So there's other stuff. So there's going to be a lot of plug-in locations which you can just grab and use or mod as you wish. There are things like a graveyard, a mine, a town, that sort of thing. Yeah. So you can just grab those and then you can just change them or put stuff in them or take things out or whatever. But each comes also with like a pre-made story.
which you can ignore it completely you don't have to use it but if you just wanted to grab a graveyard put it in there and just run the pre-made story you've just got a little sort of you know mini adventure there ready to go and you could presumably build an entire campaign just out of all of these different locations and their pre-made stories
yeah and i imagine as they go by you combine your adventures which will have all this stuff in and yeah yeah and the idea is you also you could you're supposed to share content with others okay so if you create stuff you should be able to sort of share it whether that's on a marketplace or whether that's just literally hey i i made this and you just send it to them and they use it i don't know
The Sims has that, doesn't it? Like, if you build a house in The Sims, you can share it for free with the rest of the community and be like, I made a house that looks like a boat. And everyone's like, cool, I'll download that. So maybe like that.
I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to tell, really. I mean, there's a whole level builder. And they've described it as the best miniature set that you could have. And you just snap together different kit pieces. And it kind of looked to me like, basically, what you have there is a digital version of Dwarven Forge.
Right.
is what it kind of looked like to me. And you're snapping all these things together digitally to make all these different dungeons or whatever. But also it's not just dungeons like Dwarven Forges, it's like graveyards and towns and all sorts of things.
Yeah, yeah.
So that looks kind of cool. Like quite Neverwinter Nights-y. You know how that was tiles?
Yeah.
You put different tiles together.
Well, I'll have to take your word for it. Never actually experienced Neverwinter Nights. But yeah, like there's lots of different make your own stuff out there.
That's quite exciting. I'm intrigued by this. I have signed up to beta test it when it comes out. I will certainly be giving it a try.
So, on your Mac...
Well, next to me is a PC.
Oh, okay. I was going to say, it's not going to be on Mac at first.
We're an integrated household. We have both options.
A mixed computing household.
Yes. Yeah, it's going to be starting on PC. They're going to have other platforms later, including mobile and console. So they basically want it on every platform they possibly can, but it's starting on PC, apparently.
I know, I fully expect it. I didn't expect the beta testing to be available on Mac, to be honest.
Yeah, fair enough.
I was shooketh to my core when Baldur's Gate 3 was, when I had the early access version on Mac. I was like, what? Fantastic. I'll spend 30 years on that.
Yeah, they showed some clips of some secret doors and traps going off and a lift that literally went up and down between levels and a camera which kind of swooped in around them. I don't know how much... A lot of this was quite fancy camera work. And I don't know how that will actually...
appear in game where the DM is expected to operate a virtual drone as well I imagine each player will have their own camera they can operate kind of like if you were playing a game online but I imagine for pre-built scenarios you'll have some automated camera movements once something big happens so it works in that way I say I imagine like I know anything about it that would be cool if that were the case is what I mean to say
They also showed a little quick thing of Drizzt fighting Optimus Prime.
Okay, that's a choice.
That's Drizzt O'Urden, the Dark Elf, from the Forgotten Realms, fighting Optimus Prime, the Transformer, from not the Forgotten Realms, from Cybertron. Yeah.
Okay.
I think it would be basically like being attacked by a toddler with a knife or something. You're like, ah, no, back, back. Optimus Prime is trying not to straight out kill Drizzt accidentally. And it's like, oh, have you? Attack! It's like, you're very tiny, and these swords were annoying.
Yeah, the shot was some over-Optimus Prime's shoulder, so you could sort of see the back of Optimus Prime's head and shoulder, and drizzled down on the ground, looking quite small. Yeah, yeah, it's like a bit of a discrepancy.
Yeah, yeah. He does have a magical power, though, so I feel that would make an order of power difference.
Other little bits and pieces. If you have artwork of your own, you can just put 2D tokens on there. Flat 2D tokens from any artwork. And also you can use 2D maps. If you've got a 2D map from an older adventure or something, you can just write that one there. So basically you'll see that 2D map in a sort of isometric point of view, but it will still be flat.
And your tokens will be flat on that map. So it will look like a map with tokens on it on a table sort of thing. So you can do that rather than having to build the old 3D models and all that stuff. But I think the goal is to have you collecting virtual minis and things like that is how it's going to go.
Because one of the things, they're going to give you a free digital gold dragon mini to kickstart your Project Sigil collection if you pre-order the 2024 physical and digital core rulebook bundle.
Oh.
So that, I think, kind of shows where that's going. So it's going to be very collectible, I'm guessing. That's the sense I'm getting.
Something about that gives me pause. I don't know.
Yeah.
I can't articulate why, but something about it, I'm like, ooh, something makes me feel uncomfortable about that. And I don't, I don't know. I can't articulate why that is. I'll need to reflect.
I mean, with D&D Beyond, you get like, if you pre-order this, you get free dice. Oh, it's not the concept of getting something free.
It's the concept that
is this going to be a modular you have to rebuy all your monsters and all that stuff like that like how does that i don't yeah i know i also don't know but something about that makes me feel a bit because i kind of think if you bought the pdf or the digital version of like their monster manual it would be like and here's all the monster tokens like that that would just that would be amazing that would make sense to me
Yeah, I don't know.
But I don't know if that's what they're going to do. And I have feelings about that. And I haven't fully thought through what those feelings are.
Some publishers will write a book called Monsters and give you a digital set of art of all the monster tokens. Like a 3D monster token would be extra work. But it's like, I suppose the nickel and dime thing to do is just get people to buy them.
Yeah.
Or whether people will just be buying individual monsters. I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, to me, it seems like, yes, it is an investment. It would be a bit of money, but you're a multi-billion dollar company. And you instantly, instantly kickstart a market because people are like trying them out. And for older people, like, oh, it's not for me. There will be people who never bought it. Oh, it's a bit nice. It's a bit nice. And then they're just like, go buy more.
And then you've got third-party traders who are making these. And you just generate massive amounts of money with that initial investment.
We don't know what sort of money we're talking at the moment. What does a miniature going to cost you? Is it going to cost you 50 cents? Is it going to cost you $10? Who knows?
It depends on volume. Volume of sales is not going to... I'm going to make a wild prediction. Volume of sales is not going to be an issue.
Yeah.
It's really interesting to see if a small miniature and a large miniature cost the same, given that because they're digital... It doesn't actually matter. It doesn't actually make any difference. It's just what size you set them to. So whether they're going to charge you more for a dragon than a goblin, when in fact they're both basically digital assets.
Well, bigger models, even if they are, say, in plastic, they do require more work because there's more detail. Because there's more certainty.
All right, if you're doing it on that, what if you've got a goblin that's like an alchemist and totally loaded down with tons and tons of stuff and a dragon that's got nothing?
If you've got a rubbish dragon, then you should probably get that.
Get an alchemy dragon, obviously. But what I mean is, in that case, the goblin has required more work, so should the goblin cost more than the dragon?
I don't know about Sean, but this is literally a case for a free market where he's like, I reckon my goblin's worth a tenner. And people look at the goblin and say, oh, that's a nice goblin. I say, oh, no, too much of my blood.
I often say the phrase, oh, that's a nice goblin. Sorry, I'm just sorry. It's a common term around these parts, yeah. It spoke to me there. Okay, all right.
It's how we are in Hampshire.
Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway. That's Project Sigil.
Okay. I mean, I continue to be intrigued, but cautious and have feelings about that.
Yeah. Well, they did say you could have played other games on it as well.
Oh, really?
The impression I got was they meant that in the sense that you can put a miniature on a map and move it around and roll some dice and have it not handle the rules for you. And then basically you can play any role-playing game on it because it's not doing the rules.
Sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, powerful stuff if they do that. Like, honestly, it's like the more easy and open access they make it, the more people will be buying into it and into the secondary markets. And if Wizards gets like 1% of every sale, then they will absolutely coin it. And they won't ask for 1%.
Someone pointed out to me, I On Wednesday night at your club, in fact, another 3D virtual day. There are a couple of them out there, but one that's coming on Steam. And I had a quick look at the trailer for it on Steam. And it looks pretty much like it's a third party one by, I think, a French company. I can't remember his name. I can't remember his name. But a French company.
And it's going to be free to use. So I'm not sure how it gets monetized, but it looked as good as this.
Yeah.
It was the amazing thing. So, you know, there is going to be competition out there. Yeah. And if there's free competition out there.
I mean, I feel this is very much like we're going over world-frogging ground, market externalities, like the powerful network effects. It's like, If they forfeit it and hide it behind and make it super restricted to use or try, someone else will have it and steal their market share.
And if they make it super easy to use, super friendly, you're just not going to be able to stop people from using it. They will just be like, yeah, I'm just going to use it because it's really good. It does everything I want. I can use it for my games as well. And everyone else will be shut out. That is... I don't...
It's a really successful model that they've done before, rejected before, done terribly.
And again, it's just... Game finders into it as well and things like that.
Oh, thanks.
And linking it with D&D Beyond. It's basically going to become the default way of playing D&D When you're not in person, I think.
They could honestly make this like just almost default community. But if they paywall it high enough, they build a homeless paywall, they will keep people out.
Well, like you say, that's the whole free market thing there, isn't it? It's about getting the price right. Yeah.
And I would argue that free is the correct price for the basic sets to make it happen. Otherwise, they are literally doing themselves a service. Fortunately, they don't listen to me. That's a terrible idea.
People on this podcast are currently. I'll talk about D&D Beyond, by the way. Do you remember we were talking about how bells were getting changed last week?
No, they're not.
They've gone back on that. So last week, for those who might have missed it, so last week we were talking about how D&D Beyond was going to be handling the 2014 rules going forward. And for most things, they were going to be like a 2014 and a 2024 version. Mm-hmm. which you could choose from. And the 2014 one would be my legacy. But spells were notably missing from that list.
Yes.
And it basically meant that everybody was going to have to be using the 2024 spells, not the 2014 spells. Yeah. They've backtracked on that now and basically said, sorry, we've heard what you said and we misjudged that. Now, yes, you're going to be able to choose between the 2014 and 2024 spells.
Well, I did like a little tiny bit of backing them up like that. And assuming you're really good at homebrewing stuff on D&D Beyond and it only took you three minutes per spell, then you could get it done in a mere six hours.
Yeah.
Six hours of data entry.
That's why I got into role-playing games.
oh well we know why you guys are all about the spreadsheets yeah yeah yeah but um apparently forcing all your customers to do six hours of data entry or have other terrible choices is apparently a bad idea and they backtrack so good i i'm glad for those people who do not have to do At least six hours, by the way, because that was based on three minutes per spell.
The thing that I just found really odd about that was, why just spells and not everything else? Why wouldn't it all be all or nothing? Why nearly everything except spells? That's what made it weird.
Or, and this is a crazy idea, just ask. Would you like to take your spells? No? Okay. Well, you can ask again later.
That's what they're doing now, isn't it? You can choose.
Are they offering...
option to change over there or is it just they're not going to do it unless you opt in specifically well I don't know what the interface is going to look like I think it's when you create your character they have a tick box of which rules do you want to use and things so I don't know yeah if you select your sources type thing I don't know I think this is good because they said they were going to do something and the community came back saying they didn't want it and then they've changed tack which is I think all you can ask really isn't it like yeah you listen to your community feedback and go okay we're going to do that then
Like, cool.
Fair enough.
Yeah. Right, anyway. There's some other D&D news. There's some other stuff that's coming out next year.
I do want to talk about the third-party creator partners.
Oh, let's do that first, then. Okay, let's do that one first, and then we'll do the books. You were intrigued by this.
Intrigued, yes.
Intrigued.
I'm intrigued.
Intrigued.
In summary, so they announced that, so there have been other third-party stuff on the D&D Beyond Marketplace. And they've announced more publishers that they're going to be working with. It's got the Griffin Saddlebag, MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Dungeons & Dudes, Hitpoint Press, Kobold Press and Free League. So it's all people who've made 5e compatible products that have million dollar Kickstarters.
So like Free League is like the 5e Lord of the Rings thing and stuff like that.
That's the interesting thing. Like Wizards of the Coast is going to be selling 5e Lord of the Rings to you.
Yes.
He's fascinating. Go back 50 years or 40 odd years, DSR was being sued by the Tolkien estate for having hobbits, Ents and Balrogs and had to change them to halflings, treants and badels.
How the turns table.
Yeah. But yeah, that is interesting. Those terms were well and truly tabled, were they not?
Indeed. But yeah, because also they didn't buy the rights of them and loads of stuff was going on.
Yeah, like Lorraine Williams passed on the rights to Middle Earth back in the early 90s saying it wasn't worth it.
Well, there we go. That's the thing. And the thing that interested me was Cobalt Press being there. Because they do a lot of 5e stuff and I'm not surprised because they're of that scale, but is because the Project Black Flag felt very like a rebellion, like, ah, stick it to the man, we're going to make our own version. And now they're like, we're working with a man.
I don't know, it just felt, I don't know.
I know what you mean, and I've seen other people say that. I get exactly what you're saying there. It does seem a little odd, but it's not like they stopped selling 5e stuff, is it? No. They continue to...
Like, but, yeah.
No.
No, but... Yeah, and that's why I was kind of like, huh, it wasn't like a big thing, but I just... Yeah. I'm surprised that Wizards opened that to them and invited them because their marketing was very...
But Jess, if Wizards came to us and said, do you want to put your five e-books on D&D Beyond? We're not going to say no, are we?
They're not going to ask us, but we're not going to say no. I don't know. I was surprised that Wizards invited Cobalt Press, not that Cobalt said yes. I was more surprised that way.
Cobalt Press is there in Seattle. They all know each other. There's a bit of that involved.
Yeah, but just the marketing was very... Which direction do you want them? Do you want them in your tent facing out, Or do you want them outside your tent facing in? I want their tent on fire, PJ.
No. Sorry, no.
That's not a nice thing to say about Cobalt Press. No, not Cobalt Press.
I don't want Cobalt Press on fire.
Well, that's the question that Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, has to ask themselves. This is by far the biggest competitor because absolutely enormous. Do you want them on your side pretty much? Or do you want them outside? It's on. They still... they still require third parties to produce a lot of the content for their game.
They do not have the people in-house to make the books, to make the adventures, to make all of the subclass, all of the ecosystem. They still need people to make that. Because they can't do it themselves. They don't have enough people.
Do you remember the university-decried OGL 2.0 that they tried to introduce a year or so ago?
OGL 2.0?
Oh. When they were cancelling the OGL, they were doing great. The OGL 2.0. Oh, yeah. Paying Wizard of the Coast fees and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, yeah.
The fees charter, yeah, yeah, where they could just say, eh, we'll take animal. I'll be beneath what you get out of it.
we'll cry yeah i remember that okay well that's this you know they didn't need to cancel the otl they just need to make a platform that people wanted to use instead yeah which they've done they've come up with a platform that people want to use and instead of forcing people to do that people are coming to them and saying please let us do that yeah so you know people will be begging to pay
40, 50, 60% of their earnings because it's a big party. It's what a lot of people are saying on DMs Guild.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what percentage it will be. It's fine. I mean, DMs Guild is 50%. Yes, DMs Guild is 50%.
We don't know what these deals are because these are private ones and they might have different deals with different third parties as well for all we know.
Yeah, most probably. But also this involves them actively writing code for each of these things.
Yeah.
So on GM's Guild, Wizard of the Coast doesn't have to do anything. You upload your PDF and start selling it. Wizard of the Coast has to do nothing. On this, you have to send Wizard of the Coast your files. They have to painstakingly code each thing.
I mean, sure. As I said, it's like new ancillary services, which further raise the bar to... third-party development but then to be fair wizards don't have to code it it's like apple doesn't code every app in the app store apple gatekeeps and says if you meet our policy requirements you can have something in the app store um if you don't then you can go late
And for this privilege of having something in the App Store, you may pay 30%.
Yeah, but that's because the items in the App Store are siloed, though. They want the items here to literally work with D&D Beyond. So if you've got, like, a new class, for it to work with D&D Beyond, it has to actually be coded, doesn't it?
Yeah, so that will be a job that Cobalt Press... would have to incur the expenses for for access to the market. And then they will have to pay a further fee on top.
Yeah, okay, yeah. But that also then means telling people, giving people access to the D&D Beyond code.
Yeah, which they're probably not going to do.
I feel at this point we are venturing beyond our technical expertise as to what can and can't be done. Maybe there are people who might have a better idea. Imagine that there are probably some quite clever software people. Well, maybe there isn't. I don't know. Maybe they cheaped out.
It depends also how D&D Beyond is being designed. Is it being designed with all these hooks that makes it easy for you to code stuff that hooks into it? Hmm. Because we've spoken to people that were on the D&D Beyond Design team years ago, some of whom went on to Evil Genius Games and then left Evil Genius Games.
And the impression I got was that it's a little bit, not as bad as Roll20, but it is kind of sort of like a little cobbled together and aging now.
Yeah, I guess it's almost like if there's a black box, which is this new website or whatever, and you want to have something, it will have various places where you can have inputs. You are not required to know what goes into the input, but I guess you'd be given details. They could probably back-engineer it. I don't know what it's going to do. They might even put it open source.
Well, I mean, maybe, maybe not. It's hard to say. They've got a lot of the market positioning. They've got the art assets. The art assets are what's their cost. That's going to be expensive, so... I mean, there's good arguments to not keep it secret, because the code itself is useful, but the more eyes on it, the more security it is, the better it is.
Well, certainly the situation at the moment is that Wizards codes each thing to send to them.
Yeah, yeah.
So whether that will ever change, I don't know, but that's certainly the current situation.
Yeah, yeah. As I said, we don't know. This is so far outside our domains of knowledge. We're just like...
Well, the reason, because, like, we, you know, as you know, are working on Level Up Gateway, which is similar to DMD Beyond in concept. And when you say we... You're paying some smart people to do this work. I am not personally coding it. Alexander is, yeah, very, very competently coding it. Yes.
Good job.
But people do ask, you know, will third-party products be usable on it? Hmm. And we've just kind of like, we're like, we would like that. But from a technical point of view, that means that third parties will have to learn how to code the plugin module for your thing. It's not just a bit of text. A class isn't a bit of text. It's a whole thing that does stuff. It's a computer program.
Yeah, because the way it's built in is if you take your armor off, it affects your bonuses and your armor class.
It's not like you can upload a PDF and it will just start working.
So it's not very accessible. So it may be the case that it's like that on D&D Beyond, which is what I would expect.
yeah yeah each of these books is a computer program it's not a it's not a book yeah yeah I mean obviously Foundry has their own things like a data file which then interacts with the underlying Foundry logic but yeah sure yeah I imagine there's a bit of computer programming here I think Foundry was made in mind for to have an interface where people could do that like I think
yeah sensible yeah anyway anyway that's the third party stuff so yeah so yeah I'm definitely interested in the concept of wizards selling Lord of the Rings now which is kind of fun that's cool yeah well I gave a games workshop before they became Warhammer and worked on that as well So, yeah.
I wonder if that will tie into the 3D virtual tabletop, Project Cigali, and then you'll be able to get, like, 3D models of Gandalf and one around Middle Earth. Someone will build Middle Earth on that. I don't know. Would that happen?
I would expect Helm's Neck to be a very popular one.
Yeah.
The Shire. The Shire would be a nice one.
I'd love to do a Helm's Deep battle.
See, I just have to mention it.
My eyes glaze over. But you know what the best one would be, of course? The Mines of Moria. And there is a big... It has now been mapped by Free League. So in theory, presumably, they could take that adventure and...
Ooh, that's... That would be so cool. That's very intriguing. I've got the work ring on my shelf over there.
You could fight the Balrog on the bridge at Khazad-Dum. That'd be amazing.
I mean, I've got Shadow Dark, so I've got Shadow Dark, I've got the Minds of Moria, I've got the Celeste background, which... as you'll recall, is very focused on verticality and light and dark. I'm like, this looks like it might have legs. I could do something with this. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Well, that's Project Sigali. Yes. So we've got some books. We've got some books coming next year. Many books. Discuss. Yeah. So the first of these books is called the D&D Dragon Anthology.
Hmm.
It's a working title, apparently, but it's a book with 10 adventures which feature dragons in dungeons. Interesting.
That feels on brand.
Old choice. Yes.
Well, I mean, surprisingly, they've done a lot of adventures which don't have dungeons and don't have dragons.
I know, which is off brand.
Yeah, that might be where they've been going wrong. So, like I say, maybe we'll see a reprint of Council of Worms or something like that.
Yeah, I don't know whether it's going to be old stuff reprinted or some of the anthologies they've done or whether it's going to be brand new. I've no idea.
But they are quite focused on doing Greyhawk as the fourth setting now, aren't they?
You've got a whole chapter in the Dungeon Master's Guide, yeah. So maybe there'll be new stuff.
I'm looking at the artwork and the scale of some of these dragons as well.
Yeah, that gold dragon.
The one, the gold dragon floating that's got a ribboned effect that's in a valley.
Yeah, it looks amazing.
That looks like, I don't even know how to describe the scale of that because it looks like there's little buildings down there and they're barely the size of one of its spines. How do you fight that? You just go home and cry.
Well, that's also the fact that it's close to you and they're far away. Some dragons are big and some dragons are far away. Some dragons are far away, yeah. There's that Tiamat. There's a big old Tiamat there. It's like totally wrecking a town, which is quite awesome. They've got a gorgeous red dragon. They do be like that, wrecking town. Yeah, yeah.
But we don't know much else about that other than that there's going to be a... It's coming sometime in 2025. It's a dragon anthology of adventures featuring dragons in dungeons.
Nice. Yeah. That sounds good. Like, cool, yeah.
There'll be reprints, maybe it'll be breakable, maybe it'll be a mix. We don't know. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see.
As soon as we know, we will tell you.
Yeah. Yeah. Right, next coming out next year is a brand new starter set, which is currently named Heroes of the Borderlands.
Oh, goodness. Oh, I suppose they do have this new edition.
Yeah, for the new edition, yeah.
Are we calling it a new edition now? Yeah.
No, they're not.
No? Oh. The 2024 browser. What they used in the video, an awful lot, was a reimagining. This is a reimagining of the Player's Handbook. And we have reimagined the Monster Manual. It's like lots and lots of kind of like... approximate synonyms for edition without actually using the word edition.
Or less than that time, Russ is bravely making his way in the face of what I can only describe as overweening sceptical expressions. He's doing his absolute best, listeners.
Heroic efforts, heroic efforts. I'm not going to get into it because I've said it all before, but carry on.
Yeah. Anyway, so this new Starter Set, it's set in an area called the Borderlands.
What does it border?
Is it the sea?
Is it bordering the land?
No. No. I think it's two lands that border each other because there's a keep on those borderlands. Famously so. There's a keep on the borderlands.
Next to the chaos wastes.
Next to the caves of chaos.
That sounds like such a stressful place to live.
Yes, it is. People keep on wandering in and trying to murder you and steal your stuff.
Some people are energised by chaos. Some people like it.
Oh, I'm not.
Yeah, I'm not.
No, it's not for me.
Yeah. Yeah, so Heroes of the Borderlands is a working title. It's got character creation in it, which starter sets haven't had before, I believe. They've just had pre-gens in. Is that correct, as I recall?
Shrug.
It's got intuitive, component-centric character creation. I don't know what that means. It's a long word. Component-centric, would you say? Intuitive component-centric.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's sort of what I've been proposing for a while, that skill set implement. It's basically, you have a bunch of skills, like a skills package, but it's all written down. Imagine it's a bunch of playing pieces, and there's a character sheet which is basically blank, but you grab...
these components and you put them onto the character sheet and it just works yeah yeah like little cards in the right shapes i would love to be able to do that with just like you just grab your heritage and you grab your culture and you grab your background you just put them down and there's your character it's a little it's a hand of cards
But it wouldn't quite work because then you'd just be looking on different cards for different things which should be together. So it wouldn't quite work. But I like the idea of it. Yeah. But then you'd have combat bits on each card and you'd have exploration bits and spells on different... It wouldn't quite work, but... I mean, it's not impossible.
I'm actually quite interested in what they're going to do with the new character sheets and whether they make them a bit more user-friendly. I think we've seen them. We've seen them. I think, oh, okay, yeah.
Yeah, we've seen them. They're fairly similar to the old ones with a few tweaks. Yeah. So anyway, this set reimagines B2, the Keep on the Borderlands, a classic D&D adventure, by splitting this adventure into three self-contained booklets. And they are the Caves of Chaos, the Keep on the Borderlands, and the Wilderness. And there will be a how-to-play video accompanying the release.
And it's all about apparently teaching people how to play D&D this set. That's its goal. It's an onboarding set.
Oh, okay. They're not going to send their own role to everyone's house.
Well, maybe electronically via the medium of an onboarding video.
I mean, it'd be a great audition piece.
Yeah, I mean, basically they should just send that one that she did with The Punisher and just tell everyone to watch that. It's really good. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so that's coming next year. I don't know when exactly. I think it's like summer-ish next year. They didn't say specifically when.
But they're saying that we're really leaning into using components to teach people how to play.
Yeah.
It's a thing they're doing. They're getting all component-y.
Yeah. If you're going to copy someone's homework, copying the World of Wargames homework is a very strong idea. They have a lot of experience with teaching people how to play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like using components to do so. Player aides.
mats cards online arts yeah great ideas then again i remember fantasy flight games and like warhammer and it was so many components and the game was so over-engineered and like i had so much space in front of me and it was so confusing it just didn't work for me at all it was too componenty yeah it was massively over over-engineered for a role-playing game
it had as many components as a board a complex board game would have and it's like this is i've got cars and tokens and all sorts of things in front of me i mean it's too much too much stuff well one a lot of people do like stuff Yeah, I know.
It's a big attraction. And two, it was Fantasy Flight, and they own Stock in a Car. They're a board game company, yeah. I mean, that's what they do. But even in board games, Fantasy Flight are well known for just having all the components. Stuff, yeah. I mean, am I wrong, Jess?
Yes. No, you're not wrong. No, you're not wrong. You are correct. They are known for those things. Sorry, I said that wrong, and I realised how it sounded. No, PJ, you are not wrong. Yes, they are known for all the things.
Yes, you are not wrong. PJ is correct.
Do you know what? I knew what I meant.
No, you are not not wrong.
I knew what I meant and the way I spoke did not convey that.
We should move on swiftly. The really, really big news I'm going to get to last. I'm going to do some littler bits first.
What little bits have you got for us?
Lego collectible minifigs coming in September.
I feel like we talked about these already.
They have done them before. These are new ones. But they've done them before. We haven't seen these particular ones before, I don't think.
Because I remember the Mind Flayer and the little Intellect of Aura.
Yeah, no, that's ringing a bell with me too, to be honest. We've got the Lady of Pain there, we've got a Mind Flayer with an Intellect of Arrow, we've got, yeah.
Maybe we didn't, there was an announcement for this earlier.
Tasha is there. It's basically a whole lot of iconic D&D stuff.
I mean, yeah, I love the, I like the Mind Flayer.
Yeah, I mean, they're coming out September 1st, so that's like this coming week, isn't it? When's September 1st?
That's on this Sunday.
Sunday. Is it? Oh, okay. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
So maybe they did an announcement earlier that we talked about, and now they're going, it's now.
Possibly, possibly. What else is there? Yeah, there's an exhibit at the Strong National Museum of Play.
Oh, yeah.
Which is going to be Dungeons & Dragons 50 years... Well, it's basically a 50th anniversary thing, basically. Mm-hmm. This is opening in September, located on the first floor of the museum, and it features a timeline of the game's development, early artifacts from D&D's design, and a look at the influence that D&D has had on video games and culture.
This museum was founded in the 60s by Margaret Woodbury. I don't actually know where it is. I am going to quickly look up where it is, because that article fails to mention this crucial piece of information.
Yeah.
I'm guessing America, but it's in Rochester, New York, United States.
There we go. That feels like the ideal place for it, to be honest. Like, yeah.
Fair enough. So that's a thing that's happening. And then finally, we've got a Magic the Gathering secret lair drop. So this is apparently, and I don't really know Magic the Gathering, a crossover between Magic and D&D. And there's a whole load of cards being shown with things like Beholder's Innovation Ray and Beholder's Disintegration Ray and Monster Manual and Akerarak the Lich.
The Archlich, or Aserarak, however it's pronounced. The Archlich.
So there's a whole bunch of D&D darts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was like, I don't know who I said the name. I can't even say the name. No, I don't know how you pronounce it. Who is this person?
Yeah.
Yeah, I thought everyone, and then someone was like, what, you didn't recognise that big D&D name? I'm like, nope.
It says, when Acererak the Archlich enters, if you haven't completed Tomb of Annihilation, return Acererak the Archlich to its owner's hand and venture into the dungeon.
Nice. So that says to me that there's a bunch of little mini-quests that you do, and all those would be like Tomb of Annihilation.
I guess so. I guess so.
Yeah.
There we go.
Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So that's that. And then finally, Forgotten Realms. I forgot about those. So there are going to be two Forgotten Realms hardcovers in 2025. Exciting. There's going to be the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. One for players, one for, obviously, Dungeon Masters.
So both can remember.
So at this point, there will be, for 5th edition, triple the number of source books than for any other place. Like, because you've got Swordcoaster Vectra's Guide and these two new ones. So, yeah. It feels like we've got a lot of focus still on Forgotten Realms. Where's Greyhawk? Where's Greyhawk?
Well, Greyhawk's going to be in the DMG, I suppose. At least one chapter of.
Right, right. So it doesn't really feel like Greyhawk's now in the new set. It looks like we're still staying in the forgotten realms.
I guess. Yeah. So the two books, the players one will have, well, player options, basically new subclasses, feats, backgrounds, spells, new kinds of spells, they said. I don't know what that means. New types of spells. And various factions, like the Harpers or the Red Wizards of Tay. That's going to be the players book. And the DM's book is going to dig into various different parts of the realms.
And this is interesting. So what they're doing is different areas of the realms are going to be designed for a different play style. So you've got Baldur's Gate for urban fantasy, Icewind Dale for survival horror. There's the Moonshade Isles, which will be for fairy stories and conflicts which can be resolved without violence.
And there's also going to be a giant elven mega dungeon and the land of Kalimshan. And each one is basically a totally different kind of play style. So yes, that's those two books. And we don't know much more about that other than they're coming out late next year. So we're probably talking like November-ish or something.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
The artwork looks cool. That's why I wanted to look at you.
The artwork is always gorgeous. So it's going to have five, basically five in-depth setting guides. Baldur's Gate, Kalimshan, the Dale Lands, Moonshade Isles and Icewind Dale. Each for a different play style.
Love that.
That's the Dungeon Master's book. So yeah, if you want to know more about the Forgotten Isles, that's the way to do it.
Read to remember.
Yeah. Right. And that is pretty much the D&D news.
Gosh, that was a lot of D&D news.
That was quite a lot of news, wasn't it? It was more than your average amount of D&D news. How do we feel about it all? Anything we're excited about?
It sounds like this Sigil thing, or Sigil, or whatever you want to call it, will be... Sigali. Yeah, Sigali. Excuse my terrible pronunciation. Will be pretty to look at. There will be cool stuff. And maybe at some point I'll be invited to a game I'll get to go and
wander around and say oh that's very cool and maybe do cool stuff but it feels like uh one of the existing problems with virtual tabletops is it can be extremely difficult to come up with stuff on the fly and i can't say it doesn't sound like it's going to do anything to reduce that sort of problem so yeah We'll see. It depends how much you learn, how much you can grab and just plug in there.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could have a whole bunch of stuff off to one side. But yeah. And it depends on how pale it is. It's like, it's pretty... Yeah, not quite enough info yet, I guess. Once we've seen that, we'll be able to see what sort of white elephant versus dreffling snake it is. Because if it costs a lot to get into, there will be... Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong, alright?
If it costs a lot to get into, there will still be A huge customer base, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Huge, right?
Yeah, of course.
Let's not get mistaken. But there will be competition for this customer base. If it's cheap, free, easy, readily accessible, it's very concerning to be in the rest of the games industry. Yeah. Not to put too far on the point on that, yeah? So, we'll see.
Wow.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Sorry. That's my happy, happy JoyJoy take.
Yay!
There was one last bit of news I wanted to mention very quickly. Yeah, okay. Very quickly. So you remember last year, io9 shuttered its tabletop gaming news.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And people like Lynn Kredega and others lost their jobs at io9.
Yes, which was a real shame.
Linkin Deku, of course, being famous for having very, very well covered the OGL crisis a couple of years back.
And now they've gone on to do Rascal News with some other folks.
Then earlier this year, Dicebreaker closed down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is a shame.
Now there's a third one.
Oh, no.
So Comic Book News used to quite robustly cover D&D and a bit of other RPG stuff. They have been laying off a lot of their journalists, a lot of whom are posting on Twitter saying, hey, I am unemployed and looking for work.
Yeah.
And it looks like the Comic Book News is no longer going to be covering tabletop gaming news either. So that's the third one in under a year. Major outlet where tabletop gaming news could be found. They're going down like dominoes. And I'm not 100% sure why. Well, has Ian World...
with your different hat on, you must have some insight into what's there.
But we're a very different model. They make their money off of that. We don't make our money off that. But my suspicion is because two of those were due to buyouts. So Dicebreaker was part of a much larger buyout. And the people who, the entity that bought the company that owns Dicebreaker, Dicebreaker wasn't the part of it they were interested in. Yeah.
And comic book movies has just been bought by another company. And following that, the tabletop news stuff gets shuttered. So there's kind of a pattern here. Yeah. But I think what it is, is if you're running one of those sites, and this I don't have an insight into because I only cover tabletop RPG news.
If you cover movie news and comic book news and tabletop RPG news on the same site, I imagine you are going to see a massive, massive difference in viewer figures for those three topics.
Yes.
Massive difference, like an order of magnitude difference. Yeah, at least. And a new owner would look at that and go, why are we spending these resources writing these articles which get one-tenth of the views that these other articles do? Can we please just write those other ones from now on? Thanks. I think that is probably what is going on, at my guess.
That would be my guess as well, because people get into tabletop RPG stuff because they're passionate about it and they care about it. And if you look at things from a cold business perspective, often you're like, oh, this isn't where we should put our money. But...
Yeah, but that's why the TTRPG space is full of passionate, awesome people a lot of the time because people aren't here to make a lot of money because that's a very, very rare and difficult thing to do in the TTRPG space.
On a comic book news, the main D&D correspondent was Christian Hoffer.
Ooh.
who coincidentally, I'm not saying it's connected in any way whatsoever, but coincidentally has written two articles for Ian Rod this week, as it happens.
Where?
What are the chances? What are the chances? Sorry. Anyway, and that is it. That's the news. I think we're done. Yes.
Well, should we go have a chat about Phantasy Star then?
Yes, let's go and talk to Rich Luscaflair back in time about Phantasy Star.
Malek the Maleficent here. If, like me, you're enjoying this podcast, please consider subscribing on Patreon for exclusive bonus content every week and the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing you are helping to keep the show going. Subscribe at patreon.com slash maleficent. to be like that now? The things I do. All right. All right. Don't forget. Patreon.com slash Morris. Can I go now?
So we have a special guest with us here this week, Rich Lescouver from Skydawn Games, who's here to tell us all about the upcoming Phantasy Star. That's Phantasy with a PH, Star, tabletop RPG, based on, I believe, a video game. Am I correct?
That is correct. Video game series.
And when we say video game series, this is like a big, epic, early video game series. Because I think it first came out late 80s, like it was in the Sega Genesis. I played a little bit in the 90s. I'm sure it's grown and changed a lot since then. But this is a big, epic license that a lot of people will be familiar with, right?
Yeah.
But not Russ.
You know me and my relationship with video games is not a strong one.
That's fair. I mean, well, Rich, then, so people haven't heard of it. Could you give us a summary as to what the digital game is and how that is?
Yeah, so it is my favorite video game series ever. I love RPGs and I was a video game, you know, kid. I was also a Sega kid. I had a Sega Master System, which is actually what the first game came out on. Hero was released in 88, and Japan was released in 87.
And the reason why it was created as kind of like a... I don't know if it was a response exactly, but back then, Dragon Warrior or Dragon Quest... whichever variation of that is, was like the popular RPG on the Nintendo. And so Sega wanted to make a kind of like their own, you know, RPG since that was getting to be the popular thing at the time.
So they got the team together, and then I remember reading about this, and that's why I was like, oh, that makes sense as to why I love this so much. They got the team together, and Sega said, okay, make something kind of like this game, but don't clone it. We want something that plays like an RPG, but not completely unique, and we're just going to let you go at it.
No actual oversight, not too much. So that team got together, and the two of us I think I actually was one of the assistants who was kind of like working as kind of just working through the job like an intern.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, her name was Chieko Aoki. And she came up with this idea and said, hey, you know, if we don't want a clone, she was huge into Star Wars.
Yeah.
And and said and said, why don't we make something like, you know, with a sci fi kind of thing with like a like a fantasy adventure thing, but put it in space on like, you know, a system of planets. And then you had Rieko Kodama. I remember this because I was talking about it recently because she just passed away a couple of years ago.
And she came up with this vision of how the art looked and how the characters looked. And even though the person who came up with the concept was credited as an assistant of the game, She was the one that came up with the idea. And the team was a really diverse group of half men, half women, and a lot of assistant work.
And it was pretty much not really heard of for something to do for game development. And they got to do whatever they wanted. So they created something that just blew the socks off of everything else, something like that.
totally huge and that was and that's why like and they uh they did something like uh like like the first fantasy star game for example it's it's uh i get excited when i talk about it you were a big fan it certainly sounds i was a big fan yeah i was a big fan i'm getting that sense yeah the very first scene of the game and that's kind of what i wanted to to to get into
yeah like you know when the rpg stuff is like the very first scene it's it's like you the guy that you would expect to be like the hero of like every other game in the first scene he's he's uh you know he's he's dying he's on his deathbed they're like okay you know the big the big hero he's dying you know he he gets stabbed he's dying he gives you know he he tells his sister some game of thrones vibes going on yeah
Yeah. He, he tells his sister, Hey, like, you know, save the people and, and like, you know, rescue them from the King's tyranny. And then he dies. And then the sister who becomes like the, the big, like, you know, main hero character, which is also not. Yeah. Goes, goes. Yeah.
Heroes in the eighties. Yeah.
Okay. I'm going to help the people by killing this guy that killed you. And then like, after I kill, I'm going to pick him up and kill him again. Like, you know, he's, you know, she's like this like big revenge story. And, and it was, it was really, it was really cool. All right, I'll stop gushing about that.
We've barely started. Can you touch on what's the genre?
What's the actual game about? It is very sci-fantasy. The original game was very like, you know,
Kings, you know, kings of planets. And like, you know, you had like these fantasy domed cities with spaceports. And it was like this perfect blend of sci-fi and fantasy. And then it goes and then what makes the series great is that its sequels follow the story generationally.
you know like every thousand years like oh wow okay the story comes up and then like they tailor back to the original game and follow this flow of a storyline yeah that like once you get to it's like almost looking for a plot twist somewhere like you know late in the game you're like oh this is how this whole thing connects to to this game and you know that's that's another another element that i thought that was kind of unique
Yeah, a real weird fiction vibe.
Yeah.
It's got like sort of a saga nature to it as well. Yeah, okay.
Yeah. So how did you end up getting the license to produce the official tabletop RPG? I assume you contacted Sega? Who owns it?
I did. I started by contacting reps from Sega of America. And through them, I had an interview with the team in Japan Well, first I had to do a presentation because I felt like this is content that I'm a big fan, but the majority of the people that really knew a lot of this stuff either passed away or aren't with the company anymore. So I had to kind of put together like a...
Here is the game you make.
Here's the game you own the rights to.
It's really awesome. Here's what a tabletop RPG is. Here's what I made earlier. And this is why you should get me to give you money so I can make this game for you. Is that a song?
That sounds exactly it, yes. I actually had to explain to them, like, you know, the people I was talking to did not know what D&D was. And so I had to kind of put that together and say, okay, well, let me, let me put the, it was, it had to be, it was a PowerPoint. It put together and I'm like, it explains what D and D is first. And then goes into like, you know, what the, what fantasy star is.
And the, and I kind of explained that like fantasy star was like a huge inspiration for the RPG that I already made, which was Esper Genesis. So I'm kind of bringing that full circle back to, you know, Phantasy Star, which was one of the licenses I wanted to go with.
Always wanted to go there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's going to be powered by your Esper Genesis game.
It is.
Which in turn is 5e powered itself. Is that correct?
Yes. The reason why I said powered by Esper Genesis is because it has a lot of the sci-fi elements that are unique, like the starships and the gear and all of that and rules that are not in standard 5e. Yeah. It's more of that than just like the core mechanics.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember you came on like two years ago. Three years? It was a while ago. Maybe three or four years ago. Before we were doing Level Up Press, it was quite some time. Sorry. Yeah, but you came on to talk about Espigenesis then, and we can probably put a link in the show notes if anyone wants to go and listen to that episode again and sort of get a recap on Espigenesis itself.
But do you want to just give us a really, really quick
sort of primer just really quick and then we'll go back to fantasy star just so people know the context we're talking really quick it's heroic you know science fiction you know powered by powered by fifth edition it has uh it has sci-fi like you know planets and gear and starships and robots and you know rules for like the matrix and like you know basically taking anything that you would you would see as far as creating something fantasy for dnd and creating something sci-fi
I think it's probably one of the first 5e sci-fi games, I think. It's been around a while now.
I saw it and I was really impressed by how well you implemented the firearms rules. in fifth edition. I was like, oh, okay, that looks okay. Would work quite well. Like with the Sustained Fire, you make a dexterity saving from, in like a small group. Yeah, for Burst Fire. That is, yeah, Burst Fire, sorry. Sustained Fire, just showing my age and my worth. Yeah.
But yeah, yeah, making that text, I was like, that's a good idea, that'll work, yeah.
I guess that makes Phantasy Star a lot more accessible to people that have only played D&D and perhaps want to stay playing that. It's not going to be that much of a transition to play Esper Genesis then. It's not like, oh, it's a brand new, you know, it's going to feel familiar.
You're rolling a D20 and, you know, so it's going to be the mechanics that you're comfortable with, but in this brand new world, there's going to be a new story that you've not experienced. Is that... Would that be a good pitch, yeah?
Yes. As for Genesis-wise, when I originally designed it, I designed it so that if you really wanted to, you could put a dwarf in a starship. And it'll work.
Yeah, amazing.
Now it's kind of, you know, it's going a little bit different now. You know, D&D is doing its own thing. So I am doing that as well. Yeah, fair enough.
That's fair. So Esper Genesis is a standalone game, isn't it?
Yes.
You don't need the core D&D. Do you need the Esper Genesis books to play Phantasy Star, or is that also standalone?
No, that is also going to be standalone. Okay. However, I am going to design it so that if you really wanted to blow it out to other things, you can always take the Esper Genesis rule.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, there will be assessment across the path. There's the Voidrunner's Codex. I would definitely recommend picking up the Esper Genesis Threats database to instantly expand your monster options. And so, yeah, if you're doing... If you're doing 5e and sci-fi, then, you know, this feels like a very, very obvious choice to look and look at.
Yeah, there's some things that I think, like, you know, people say they're using 5e, and I think that's not the best fit. But I think for, like, for really sort of heroic science fantasy, I think 5e is a really, it's a solid choice, solid choice of a system to use for that.
Yeah. Like the zero to hero walk, I feel is like very baked in. You're giving me a lot of nodding here, Rich.
Well, there's also, there's a lot of, a lot of people like, you know, bash on it because of, you know, it's, it's, it's existing elements, but there's, there's so much you can do with it that a lot of people haven't tried. Yeah. Yeah. And they ask you, they're like, oh, why would you want to do that when there's other systems? I'm like, well, because everyone knows this one.
and because i know and because i know this one you know so because i'll sell 10 times as many books by using 5e yeah then i've been playing dnd for you know since my teens so like yeah so fancy star coming to kickstarter is it next year i know it's 2025 no kickstarter no kickstarter oh okay yeah that's that's no no no that's that is well that's actually part of part of my agreement Right, yeah.
Got it, right.
Yeah, some IP holders don't like using that. I think Disney won't let anyone use Kickstarter with any of their Star Wars stuff or Marvel stuff or anything like that.
Which is kind of like, okay, I understand from their point of view. From my point of view, it's like, what, you don't think this is going to make money? Of course it is. It's going to make a lot of money. But yeah, I do understand that's how they operate as a company is concerned with everything else.
I think it's possibly an element that some of these large companies don't necessarily understand Kickstarter as well.
Yeah, and how integral it is to the TTRPG industry. Not just Kickstarter, but crowdfunding is such a commonplace thing. So for us, it's like, yeah, of course.
For people I've spoken to, it's kind of like there's too much of an overlap between crowdfunding and investing in the mind of somebody that hasn't encountered Kickstarter before.
I mean, you're a venture capitalist, it's true.
yeah yeah so so you know i think there's like a slight concern they don't really understand what what the what the actual relationship is between a kickstarter packer and a you know because because there's some talk on kickstarter that you're investing in a product as opposed to you know and i think i think some of that terminology can possibly put you know maybe some larger companies i don't know i can't speak for them
There's also an image thing, right? As a big company, if you've been around for that long and you're not really too familiar with the TTRPG space... Why would you need to crowdfund? A, why would you need to crowdfund? And B, do you want to put your official IP or your logo or something on someone else's...
I'm kind of looking at it from the 10,000-foot view and going, okay, it sucks, but I really want to do this project.
So traditional release next year. When next year? Is there a date planned?
I did not put together a hard date because I learned my lesson from...
from the last from the last project i still have a i i have a kickstarter that only now uh that we that we had actually established a skydon game studio we kind of we kind of took over the production and are and are getting things out but you know you know the kick the kickstarter is like well you know well over well over a year late on delivery and that was because we had when we originally concepted it we had put together kind of like a whole a whole thing like a a
Actually, not long after we did our interview here, you know, one of my business partners, he unfortunately passed away.
Yeah.
And then like everything kind of like collapsed under our feet, you know, after that. And then, you know, time and like projects and like everything, like, you know, we were having issues handling a lot of things. And then... We had like the whole thing changed with the printing that became three times worth three times as expensive as it used to be. And and so I'm just kind of planning ahead.
Right. You know, I'm like, hope for the best plan for the worst. Right. You know, that's. Yeah. So we will be shooting to get this out by mid 2025. That's that is the that's the goal line. With leaving room for potential pitfalls.
What product should we be expecting? Like a hardcover book? Is there adventures coming?
It's going to be a hardcover book. And I wanted to make it palatable. Palatable. Desirable, I guess, is a better word for both RPG players and Phantasy Star fans. I'm like a gigantic Phantasy Star fan. And so, like, even if, like, I didn't play RPGs, I wanted to make a book to be like, yeah, I want that book.
So it's going to be part of a coffee table reference book as well. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, a lot of things that people haven't really, you know, seen or read about or seen, like, you know, So someone said, I read something recently. Well, I already got what I wanted out of it. I sent like a preview sketch of characters. Someone said something like, I got to see like my favorite, like official art for my favorite character from like 35 years ago. Wow. Okay. Yeah.
So we've got a hardcover core rule book. What else have we got in the plans? What's in the oven?
Before that, I'm putting together, because we are not crowdfunding, I can kind of present the game the way that I want to. I guess that's the advantage. So I'm putting together a starter kit, like a starter adventure that's going to come out.
Rust loves a starter set.
Hopefully within the next couple of months. It's not going to be like a starter box. It's not going to be a starter box or anything. It's going to be digital, but it's going to be a, you know, since I'm making the game for... for both, you know, old RPGers and for fans. It's going to be, here's an intro adventure. Here's kind of like a starter on how to play with the rules.
And it's going to be, you know, set in an event that happens during the very first game so that people that are getting into the game, they're already familiar with the scenario.
Right, because you're him.
And it uses the four main characters of the original game. that you can play while you're running the adventure. So I thought that was kind of a cool idea. I'll have that up there. And then the plan is for people that are getting into it that way, then maybe I'm going to offer probably special discounts for people that want to purchase the book going forward, people that are really interested.
Nice.
And in terms of marketing and so forth, obviously we've had Phantasy Star Online, How are you going to reach these people who might not necessarily be role players?
So Fantasy Star Online is a different... So when Fantasy Star Online came out, they actually took the entire classic story and all the characters in Fantasy Star and kind of forgot about them.
Oh, okay, so it's like a different timeline.
Yeah, it's like a whole different timeline and a whole different thing. I plan on introducing some Phantasy Star Online elements, you know, and some art and kind of like putting in some of those online elements in the gameplay as well without necessarily directly connecting the two because they're not really connected.
Yeah. They're not the same, but yeah. Okay. Oh, I guess you mentioned, oh, sorry, Russ, I'm talking to you. Please. Oh, I was just wondering about art and so forth as well, because. Are you getting any help with that, or do you have access to the original things?
I do now. So when I thought about the original artwork, I was like, well, the original artwork is... Yeah, yeah. Well, no, no, no. I mean, it's great artwork, but the computer artwork, it's also very old. It's dated, yeah. It's not only that, but it's not even anything that I would be able to use for an actual production. Oh, okay.
Yeah, like low-res pixelated stuff. Yeah.
So, our lead illustrator for Esper Genesis, Santi Casas, he also happens to love Phantasy Star, which is probably why he didn't begin to love it. And, you know, he wanted to do all of, like, Kodama's characters, like, you know, Justice, because he really, really loves that, you know, the series. Yeah. he knocked it out of the park. Some of his art is already on the website.
He did this rendition of Alice that I didn't even have to ask him very much. He just kind of did it. He's like, what about this? And I'm like, oh my God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, just go and do that. He did the rest. We're on audio, but I can show you some stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I'm getting a real vibe.
The listeners will just have to listen to us going, ooh, an artist.
I'm getting a real vibe that you're saying to him, oh yeah, could you do some Fantisara? And he's there trying to play it. Sweat pouring off him. Backgrounds. Just all these Fantisara.
Yeah. It kind of made sense because it didn't click until later on because when he did the very first character for Aspergillus...
like our engineer like you know he sent it and i got so much like fantasy star vibes off of it i was like oh wow like this is great and then we kind of did esper genesis art kind of based off of that theme not understanding that i was already you know that that that we were already going on the same track with what we wanted to do i can't you're already on the same page already it's like yeah
Try and make it a bit more fancy. I can't share anything.
That's probably a setting here. I can see there's some art on the website already.
So already there's some teasers and things there. So if people are listening, we'll link that so people can have a look at that.
So we talk about who you play in a fantasy dialogue in terms of classes and things like that. What are the player options we're talking about here?
Yeah, I was intrigued by that because of the difference of the characters and stories you play on a digital game versus tabletop RPG as well. So I was also wondering, to follow on from Russ's question, because it jumps in, is how have you translated that so it works for tabletop as opposed to digital?
The nice thing about like JRPGs and video game RPGs is they kind of already give you a baseline to work from.
It is, you know, every character already has technically a class and levels and like, you know, so you kind of look at what gear they use and how they level and like what spells they have and kind of put together a, you know, and with a system that you already know, you kind of get together, oh, okay, hey, you know, I can make this work with, you know, X character.
It's a translation.
Yeah.
You speak fantasy style, you speak D&D fluently. You're like, okay, I think I understand this. I can't just plonk the mechanics in that won't work, but I get a feel for it. I know how it should feel. And getting that emotional experience. I'm telling you your job here at this point.
That's okay. You're not wrong. So there's an approach I'm going with because all of the games, they have the same species and characters and, you know, but obviously the, you know, the rules have, have changed as, as you progress in the game.
So like, I, I'm going to adopt like one of the optionals that we put into Esper Genesis and the technician's guide where you're kind of creating a hero and you have like an identity and like an origin and then, and then that, and then that origin is,
uh which your species is a part of i guess it's kind of what dnd is doing now but just a little a little bit a little different you know you can get like an environmental origin and then your you know and then your background and your and your bonds and then and then after that you can go to your to your class and the classes uh are are very they're 5e but they're very familiar to fantasy star you have your you know your hunter and then your
your scientist, your thief, your esper wizard, your mystic. Espers are like a huge part of the game. They're like a society of wizards and mystics that were protecting the planets against the dark force.
You're saying like an environmental...
background so you've got sort of who they're born as and then where they grew up sort of right right so so yeah where were you you know your your species you know can that doesn't doesn't necessarily dictate your culture you know it could just you know dictate your your appearance and then like your environment for example if you're on a heavy gravity world yeah exactly right right right these will add different yeah okay nice nice
Yeah.
Well, this sounds really exciting. I mean, just like more sci-fi options for 5e is exciting in itself, just because I feel like my first love has always been sci-fi before fantasy. I've always loved it. It's always been calling to me that fantasy is so much more popular in tabletop RPGs than fantasy is. Yeah. So, you know, every time there's a new sci-fi game, I'm just like, I'm there.
I'm looking at it. I'm checking it out. So I can't wait. I'm going to be checking this out for certain next year. So what would you admit next year? Summer-ish? Probably late summer. Late summer. Okay.
Happy birthday. Excellent. I'm trying not to set an exact date.
You have a sign up on your website so people can be notified when you know exactly when it's going to be. There's a mailing list I noticed. Is that the best way to kind of be informed when it's happening?
Yes. Actually, I put together our first mailing list for our group of what we call our pioneers, which were the people that signed up before August 15th. People that play Phantasy Star Online will recognize the pioneer moniker. If you know, you know. Yeah, exactly. But I, you know, basically sending out like, you know, hey, here's where we're at.
Here's, you know, some preview sketches that, you know, that we're doing. And I'm going to be talking about pretty soon, like the starter adventure, which I want to have out within like a couple of months. I know that the 2025 date is kind of like, oh, this is just kind of in this far-off future, and I don't really know what's happening.
And I'm like, no, I want people to actually see stuff and get excited about stuff.
This is what's happening. I will tell you, by the way, that for listeners, it's probably worth having a look at skydawngames.com slash fantasystar, because it's very much like opening up an old-fashioned computer game. You've got a start, continue... I'll click start and see what goes and it just like automatically brings up the next screen and that's a bit of design.
Very cool. Yeah. I mean, your love for the setting and the games is really apparent. It's really coming through. And I know the sort of level of detail and care that you put into Respa Genesis, and that's a beautiful, amazing game. So I have absolutely no doubt that this is going to be fantastic. Yes. I can't wait to see it. Me neither. So on that note, I think we probably need to wrap up now.
So thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah, and do let us know when that adventure comes out because I'll be digging that up for sure. Absolutely. And, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's it for this week. We will see you again next week, same time, same place. But until then, let's all go and have a weekend.
Woo-hoo!
Au revoir. Bye-bye. Au revoir.
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Lots and lots of different travellers over there. There's this mega traveller and there's loads of them. I've got like two or three of them. Nice, nice. I don't know if you can see them on the shelves behind me, but yeah, up there. I've got two or three of them up there.
I mean, you should rent some at the club. We'd love to see some more sci-fi.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know the system well enough to run it. I'd have to bone up on it.
You know, a great way to learn a system.
Is to run it.
Running it.
Yeah. The thing is, for me personally, my version of Traveller is what's always new.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
I would rather run that just because that's my game and I made it the way I like it.
Yeah, funny that, yeah.
Yeah.